Google most used S.E., but yahoo returns more searches?

I'm doing a project right now and need to answer this question:





Why is that a less used search engine (Yahoo) returning far more results than Google?





Here's an example:





Google:


Search Term #1: "wedding dresses" --8,810,000 results


Search Term #2: "wedding dresses under $100" --1,060,000 results





Yahoo:


Search Term #1: "wedding dresses" --25,400,000 results


Search Term #2: "wedding dresses under $100" --3,410,000 results





How can that be?





Is yahoo the BIGGER search engine with far less users than google?

Google most used S.E., but yahoo returns more searches?
If you search for something like "how to build website" in Yahoo, many of the top ranked results will have "how to" and "build website" in the page titles, which indicates that Yahoo puts a considerable amount of weight even on common words that occur in the search query.





It seems that Yahoo is more about text matching as compared to Google, which seems to be more about concept matching as a result of which you might see a variation in the number of search results returned by both.
Reply:its not about how many results you get. its about how useful or helpful the result you get.
Reply:Different algorithm and different index.


Google has long stated those numbers mean hardly anything, they are nothing but rough estimates.


Why the huge disparity, maybe they count returns differently.


Google may be showing website counts and Yahoo may be showing page counts.


Maybe one is a global count and the other is country specific.


It's impossible to say unless your the guy that wrote the code. I doubt you'll get a straight answer from G or Y! or MSN if you want to count them.
Reply:Google puts new sites in whats called the sandbox. The new site wont show up in googles results for perhaps a few months. Unless the site becomes popular very fast and with plenty of backlinks.