Originally Posted by
bykimbo
I've had a bit of a looksee...
The statistics given are so poorly explained, and the article so badly written, it's difficult to be sure of anything. Aside: why do people rate the site, it's soooo badly done? hey ho... However, I'd guess that the number is taken from Google Shopping US and that, therefore, it only includes those items uploaded to google.com's shopping site (not .co.uk or any others) and that it therefore shows only a proportion of total items loaded. For example, looking at today's shopping numbers a search for ebid on .com shows "About 798,000 results (0.23 seconds) " which is close enough to the claimed number to look feasible. The .co.uk seach returns "About 866,614 results (0.10 seconds)". Though the same search a few minutes earlier showed over a million, so if this is the method they're using to estimate indexed pages it seems a tad unreliable. Since they don't appear to have given that information, I'm guessing this is their route. To check, I searched for several of the other sites the same way and each time got numbers that were consistent with those in auctionbyte's chart.
So assuming their method of guestimating (I don't think we can put it any stronger than that) the number of indexed pages per site is done that way, then what you're looking at is not the total auctions here, but a proportion of those that are a) listed from the US and b) have a buy now price given and c) are not for items considered inappropriate by Google (sex, tobacco etc). In which case it's not surprising the number isn't the same as the total listings held.