Odd search results being returned

[+MartyBartfast]

I was doing some searching for specific caches earlier and I'm struggling to understand how the search page is producing these results.

 

In the UK there are about 10,000 Church Micro caches, which all contain "Church Micro ?" where ? is the number, from 1 to 10000+

 

This is a search for caches containing "Church Micro 1", it returns 5 caches, with the numbers 100 1,000 1... 10 and 1

https://www.geocaching.com/play/search?ot=4&kw=church+micro+1&c=11

If it returns 100, why not 101-199? similarly why not 1001-1999 ?

 

This is a search for caches containing "Church Micro 10", it returns 19 caches including "10...Nuffield" which was returned in the search above, but doesn't include "100" which was returned in the above search. It returns numbers in the 1000-1099 range, but nowhere near all of them, and it doesn't include any in the range 101 -109.

https://www.geocaching.com/play/search?ot=4&kw=church+micro+10&c=11

 

I do understand that there are some gaps in the numbers, and some people might have double spacing, or punctuation in that name, but that doesn't explain the results as far as I can see.

 

I don't think it's to do with distance, as I haven't centred the search or set a distance, and doing this search on just "Church Micro" returns 9,086 results, which is probably the entire group that are still active:

https://www.geocaching.com/play/search?ot=4&kw=church+micro&c=11

 

Anybody got any ideas on how the search is working to come up with these odd results?

 

Edit to add:

Even weirder, I just revisited the search for "Church Micro 10" and when I repeatedly click on the "placed on" column header to sort them it flips between 18, 19 and 20 results returned

Edited October 1, 2016 by MartyBartfast