Google's asterisk and the missing 500,000 results

Came across an interesting glitch in Google this week. I often use the asterisk in a search strategy in Google to stand in for one or more words in a phrase. Originally an asterisk between two words in a phrase stood in for one term, two asterisks represented two terms etc. So, for example, "climate * change" would look for the words climate and change separated by one word, and "climate * * change" would find the two terms separated by two words. If the quote marks are removed then a single asterisk can represent one or more words. But it now looks as though it does not matter whether there are quote marks around the phrase or not. But that is not the problem I am currently having.

One of my regular series of searches that I use in demonstrations and on training courses (phenol extraction) is coming up with some really weird results.

The standard types of searches are OK, for example:

phenol extraction about 9,700,000
"“phenol extraction"” - about 141,000

Both of those are as expected and I can browse through several pages of results if I want to.

However:

"“phenol * extraction" gives - 1-2 of about 440,000

and

"“phenol * * extraction" gives 1-5 of about 511,000

The results page only displays 1-2 and 1-5 documents with no option to look at additional documents.

Removing the quote marks gives roughly the same results:

phenol * extraction - 1 - 2 of about 441,000
phenol * * extraction - 1 - 5 of about 513,000

I mentioned this in the AIIP discussion list and another member came up with yet more variations using Polish notation:

phenol extraction * 1-49 of about 207,000
phenol extraction * * 1-44 of about 207,000

(Note: I have my preferences set to display 100 results a page).

Where did the remaining 200,000 - 500,000 results go? Anyone got any idea as to what is going on here and why my results have gone AWOL? I have submitted a report to Google but have not yet received a response, but I will comment here if one is received.

Karen Blakeman