If Google didn't search it's entire database, this supports my theory that there are probably "over 9,000 members" - I did clearly say that was on the low side. If Google only totals only SOME of the results (until it's clear that the user wants more results, or up to it's limit for resource conservation) this also supports my assertion.

Search Term Interpretation:

As for the issues with word interpretation - I knew about that, so I restricted my search to a specific URL, not text within pages. The entire purpose of Google's "site:" code is to restrict the query to a particular website, not to use those words as it would a text search. IF it's breaking the url up into separate words and checking what it's got for those, firstly, that would fail to restrict the search to a specific site and therefore make that functionality bugged, and secondly even if it did that only for the counter, the word "user" would certainly return way more results than 9,000. The term "user" gets 8 billion hits, and "lesswrong" gets 51,700 - if it's totaling site: searches that way, it would get billions of results and it didn't. Assuming it's not bugged, a misinterpretation of the "site:lesswrong.com/user" code is N/A. Since every single user page contains the phrase "comments" and "submitted", if it had broken my exact phrase exclusions into parts, I'd have gotten zero results. See for yourself by trying:

"site:lesswrong.com/user" -comments

It was not by accident that I used the query that I did.

Is my point unsupported?

IF I were trying to support some sort of important point with this user total, I would agree with the link that it is not scientific evidence and quit using it to support points, but this is N/A because if you look closely, you'll see that I am not using this as support to convince anybody of anything. My entire purpose was to verify to myself my perception that LessWrong isn't just someone's personal website with their buddies on it, that a significant number of people have actually gathered around themes like rational thought. I was overjoyed when I discovered this and wanted to share. Maybe this post will get the attention of someone who has the ability to issue a count command to the database. That's the only way we can know for sure. Though, of course, the user totals will change over time, becoming inaccurate quickly. Hopefully by increasing. (: