I haven’t run one of these tests for a while (for eight months), to track how the occidental search engines were doing with the claimed number of pages for a cross-section of websites.
Mojeek and, last time I checked, Bing were actually truthful about these numbers. Bing had missed the mark on this for some time, but began delivering in 2023, though its index is (based on this sample, and WorldWideWebSize.com) smaller than the other two search engines’. In some 2023 tests, I actually found Bing could show the number claimed—well over 1,500 results in some cases—without repetition, a huge improvement since 2022 when its index tanked. You can still see the remnants of that drop in its search index with the February and March 2023 columns: Lucire gradually came back in March after nearly a year at 10–50 results, but other domains weren’t so lucky.
Mojeek has capped its results’ delivery at 1,000, as it rightly believes a lot of computing power is needed, and imposed a limit. If you can’t find what you need in 1,000 (which no one will get to anyway), you’d probably need to redo your search query. There are improvements with Die Zeit, and generally I’ve found Mojeek has been doing better with non-Anglophone, albeit Latin-alphabet-based, websites. It also consistently shows more pages at Microsoft than Bing does.
Which leaves Google. Google will arbitrarily decide how many results you can see, but it’ll be in the hundreds for a larger site. However, its estimates are probably correct. Notably this time, it has fixed up its number for The Rake, as there was no way that domain had nearly half a million pages as it claimed in February 2023.
Bing remains a pretty small search engine in index size, around the level of an Inktomi or Alltheweb 21 years ago, while the other two keep moving ahead.
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