Yahoo Site Explorer serves conflicting results

Search engines play an important role in webometric studies as most researchers have neither the processing power, the bandwidth, or the inclination to attempt to crawl and index the whole of the web themselves. However, search engine data is very imprecise, they are estimated numbers of results, varying according to which server is being searched, how deep into the results the user is digging, and now it emerges according to whether you are logged in or not...at least according to Yahoo Site Explorer.

The volatility of the results can be seen through looking at the results for www.seroundtable.com, the site that just published a story about this particular cause of search result variety (I'm, not sure if I have come across it before). In fact there seems to be much more variation than the site first mentioned. Results depend on: whether you are logged in; how deep you digg into the results; and whether you are looking at the same page as the results (the number of inlinks can be seen when viewing the pages indexed, and equally the number of pages indexed can be seen when viewing the inlinks).

When looking at the first page (or the tenth page) of results for pages indexed, not logged in:
Inlinks = 35,171
When looking at the first page of result for inlinks, not logged in:
Inlinks = 56,200
When looking at the tenth page of results for inlinks, not logged in:
Inlinks = 55,288
When looking at the first page of results for pages indexed, logged in:
Inlinks = 187,124
When looking at the tenth page of results for pages indexed, logging in:
Inlinks = 223,242
When looking at the first page of results for inlinks, logged in:
Inlinks = 195,239
When looking at the tenth page of results for inlinks, logged in:
Inlinks = 222,681

Whilst appreciating that search engines can't know everything, they could at least have the decency to reflect this by not giving such specific results...obviously what an academic really want is access to the data itself, but we may as well wish for the moon on a stick.