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> on the whole Internet it just found 4 matches, all being the exact phrase from Shakespeare But why just 4 occurrences? Every utterance of Shakespeare has bee
by computator 7y ago
> on the whole Internet it just found 4 matches, all being the exact phrase from Shakespeare
But why just 4 occurrences? Every utterance of Shakespeare has been printed on thousands of web sites and Google has indexed thousands of those sites. Another line from the same play, "Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself", gets 10,300 hits. I tried another line from deep within the play: "I know him well: he is the brooch indeed." Google found 3,890 results. Even though the search is slow, why aren't we getting thousands of hits for "from what it is to a"?
- makomk 7y agoThe other odd thing is that if you search for the exact phrase "transform honesty from what it is to a bawd", which is what that particular all-stopword string is taken from, you get a lot more results. Clearly Google isn't actually finding most of the pages in its index that match that string.
- nwellnhof 7y ago> why aren't we getting thousands of hits for "from what it is to a"? Because Google isn't an exact search engine. Each of the terms in the phrase above appears on billions of pages. My guess is that for common terms Google doesn't store all postings in its inverted index but truncates the posting lists after a couple of million entries.