3 ms·
Ask HN: Why does Google say X million results and only gives up to Y?
Why is it that Google will say 100,000,000 results but lets you only search up 1000. Also why is it that most of the results at the bottom are sometimes from the same site?
- pivo 17y agoI imagine that the first part of the question has to do with paging. The first page is just the first n hits. But for subsequent pages they need to start at the beginning and skip page size * page number hits until they get to the hits for the current page. That gets expensive, so much so that they don't let you do it past 1000.
- dalke 17y agoI just did a search for "football checkers acequia moon" (without the quotes). It says there are about 11,400 pages, but when I go through them it ends up with 221 pages. I assume the estimation is based on some statistical predictions using the individual search words. Here they are relatively common terms (well, except 'acequia') which rarely go together. I found http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008851.html http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008851.html say "I work for google these days, though not on search. The number of hits for phrases are estimates, based on overall word frequencies". The invalidity of the estimated results has been haphazard for a long time. See http://danfingerman.com/dtm/archives/000004.html http://danfingerman.com/dtm/archives/000004.html from 2003.
- Rantenki 17y agoBecause they walk a small part of an index to figure out how many hits there _probably_ are. Geez; you think they actually count a giant left join on the internet? Also: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/26/SearchSort http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/26/SearchSort