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Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence. For example, you can type in something like "purpose of life" and it will

Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence. For example, you can type in something like "purpose of life" and it will say it has 2 billion results, yet if you try to go to result 500, you can't, it will stop at 400, then change the number to 400 results only on the last page. This happens for every query. Google lies about the astronomical number of search results, then only shows a few hundred at most.

alas44 4y ago
Could the number be valid from indexing standpoint but irrelevant search results are deemed unworthy of display to user? Unworthy + maybe costly on back-end side e.g. because infrequently accessed data is in cold storage?
- kevincox 4y ago
  That's exactly what it is. Each page is more expensive to serve than the last (it is basically joining a bunch of indexes for each term and then skipping the first N). At some number of pages they drew a line and decided that the value of these pages isn't worth the cost (and DoS vulnerability) to serve them.
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    Nevertheless, it's a dark pattern. They should make it clear to the user how many results are available to them.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      They are "available". Just the way to get there isn't by going through the result pages but by refining your search.
      - wolpoli 4y ago
        It made sense back then when you could tell Google the exact words that you are looking for. But now that Google drops random words from our query, it's not exactly easy to refine the search query.
  - groffee 4y ago
    > At some number of pages they drew a line and decided that the value of these pages isn't worth the cost (and DoS vulnerability) to serve them. They have literally one job.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      To serve you the 5 millionth search result for "funny"? Unless you are going to directly pay for that server cost it just doesn't make sense, and it is such a rare use case that it doesn't even make sense for them to give you that option. They have to cut you off somewhere. When is the last time you legitimately wanted the 401th page of the search results? It will be more efficent for both you and Google if you instead refine your search query than paging through the results forever.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        Pro tip. Never reply to someone who uses "literally" incorrectly.
        iso1631 4y ago
        A definition of literally is literally one that is "not literally true", thus using literally in this case is literally correct https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        > is literally one that Does this literally mean not literally?
        iso1631 4y ago
        It is literally clear as literal mud
- colpabar 4y ago
  I was thinking this too. Not to claim google is trustworthy, but pagination with large search result sets can be tricky when you go back really far if the queries to fetch them are expensive. The count is probably a different system from the actual results, and the count switching may just be how they handle the 0.000000001% of people who try going to page 400. So the lie may not be how high the number is, but the expectation of being able to see all the results.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    That would mean that the lie is that they show a completely irrelevant number which paints Google as a very extensive and comprehensive search engine while hiding the relevant number which is always radically smaller. > the expectation of being able to see all the results. Which would not exist if Google weren't pushing this massive mystery number that we're currently, in this thread, only speculating about what it could be referring to. This expectation could be easily solved by showing the number of results that Google is planning to return to the user, and tossing out the number that means nothing to anyone.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    > So the lie may not be how high the number is, but the expectation of being able to see all the results. The slight twist is that you can see all of the results. Just not by paging. You can refine your query to see them all. I'm sure the number is just an estimation, but it does have some value.
mortehu 4y ago
This comment could have been written in 1998. I think by now most people know how the result estimates work (i.e. not at all).
- colpabar 4y ago
  "most people" take the top results of a google search as gospel.
blastro 4y ago
wow, never noticed that before.
guestbest 4y ago
This is fraudulent marketing, but I’ve seen bing do this as well
- jolmg 4y ago
  Bing is worse in that it makes it seem like you can go to e.g. page 100 and will say stuff like "1,000-1,006 of 659,000,000 results", but it's really showing you the results from page 5. Then, for example, in page 5, 6, 7, etc. you can see the same results between them, just shuffled around. You can't even tell how many results you're really getting.
  - badwolf 4y ago
    Gawd, the same results shuffled to different positions on every different page of results, and how they make ads and sponsored "results" almost impossible to distinguish... It's truly terrible.
summerlight 4y ago
This is mostly a technical limitation and has been placed since 1998. 99.99% of search queries won't go beyond result 100 then what's the point of showing the result 10000000 other than technological demonstration?
- salawat 4y ago
  It's called "showing an accurate representation of reality" Ya know, that whole thing indexes are for by definition. Oh, but if they did that they wouldn't have a convenient way to implement dropping something from public view either, so there's that.
- inetknght 4y ago
  Technical limitation or not, it is still a lie.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    It's not a lie. "There are eleventy badillion results" is a true statement, not a promise to show you all of them.
    - xdavidliu 4y ago
      By that same logic, businesses can advertise "sale, many items 90% off" but when you show up, nothing is 90% off, and you could argue that the business only claimed that the items existed, they never said they would actually sell it to you.
      - amelius 4y ago
        I'd be surprised if this didn't actually happen.
        pessimizer 4y ago
        There are laws (at least in the US) about advertising sales that prevent it from happening.
rudasn 4y ago
Not surprising though, as others have mentioned. GitHub does this too, if you click on the Issues page and change the search query it searches all of github, not just your own repos. But you can't go to the last page of the results (not sure about the max page number, but there is a limit and for good reasons).
- rossjudson 4y ago
  That's called "good engineering". It's a lot better than "excessive pedantry".
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
<query> | head -n 500
hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
I’m sure they could remove spam results if they wanted to, but what’s the incentive when alternative engines are mediocre and time wasting will mean you’re going to use their engine for longer.
btheshoe 4y ago
... who cares? Functionally, I have never gone beyond the 3rd search page when looking for a useful website. I can see how the search engine does find the astronomical number of search results, but then just decides for technical reasons to not display them. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
AlbertCory 4y ago
The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? I joined Google in Nov. 2005, and "The Life of a Query" was one of the classes that everyone took. Even then, we were told that figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Maybe now it's 400, I don't know. What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
- appletrotter 4y ago
  > What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can? If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug. If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    > If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug. > If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature. It's a filtered mess. Search for test and then search for test test in two different tabs. Once the results appear, switch between those tabs. The estimates of results radically differ from each other, and the results are not shared between those two tabs. The tabs should return mostly identical results due to the keywords, but they are not even close to each other. If you look at the types of results shown between those two tabs, the issues with search results being filtered will be immediately shown. One tab will show 98% of the results filtered to show COVID-19 information with a little bit of results for sites that charge people to train for standardized tests. However, the other tab shows vastly different results about network speed tests, test.com, the word test at wikipedia, the definition of the word test, the etymology of the word test, etc.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  So you're saying it's incompetence not malice? Not sure if that makes it better.
- cmeacham98 4y ago
3r3r3r1111111 4y ago
RobertRoberts 4y ago
Just tested this, it stops at page 22 with no more next... wow.
- amelius 4y ago
  They expect you to click an ad and forget all about your query before that page.
foobarian 4y ago
Most of the replies under this comment are invalid because of the words "About" in front of those statements. I love the word "about" - it's even more slippery than "many," which implies non-zero.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I am about 10 miles tall. (This exaggeration is about 1 million times less severe than Google's.)
1970-01-01 4y ago
Very interesting. Just tried it with "covid-19" and its true. About 13,460,000,000 results (1.35 seconds) .. Page 2 of about 163 results (1.15 seconds) >"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."< .. About 12,620,000,000 results (1.26 seconds) .. Page 4 of about 361 results (1.75 seconds)
- texasbigdata 4y ago
  It's like the sticker that says "this amp goes to 11". Google just went further! Somewhere a product manager is beaming with pride
- therein 4y ago
  Yeah, indeed. And not only on controversial topics either. Check these videos out. TruthStream's production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyJB45ewvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyJB45ewvU Jimmy from BrightInsight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dannysullivan 4y ago
I work for Google Search. The counts we show for results are estimated. They get more refined when you go deeper into the results. But yes, there are still likely to be millions of results for many things you query -- and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those. So we show usually up to around 40 pages / 400 of these. We have a help page about this here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785
- c7b 4y ago
  Thanks for posting here. Some questions: can you confirm that the estimates are unbiased in the statistical sense? Do you have an API for accessing the other ones, the help page for my locale doesn't mention anything? If not, how do you justify showing a very high number of results that users can't access?
  - nonasktell 4y ago
    it's probably a protection against scraping and yeah there is probably billions of mentions of any single word out there if you count the computer generated content
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  So when I google "cows" and it says "Page 2 of about 1,210,000,000 results" you know full well you aren't going to show anywhere near 1,201,000,000 results yet you program it to display that? And in fact it only shows "about 231 results" which is 0.000019234% of 1,210,000,000 results. That doesn't sound like an estimate to me. To me, that is intentional misleading.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    It’s a signal that your search is generic. You can refine down more and get some hint of that. Compare: “Cows” “Cows New York” “Cows Bronx New York” “Cows Bronx New York major deegan expressway” This is a dumb example, but the count drops as the search is refined. You can use this to guide a specific search as well… in a tech example, if you search for a specific log entry while troubleshooting you might get 3 results tbat appear random. Remove elements of the search and you’ll get more results and relevance.
treeman79 4y ago
They are also answering questions. Not going to source . But answers are way off. Seen many times where it’s pulling from fan fiction, Etc
MichaelCollins 4y ago
You got a lot of responses telling you why Google can't or doesn't want to provide an accurate result count. I guess the logic is: 1. Google has to return a result count. 2. It can't/won't be accurate. 3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to large. The jump from 2 to 3 is dodgy and I see people questioning it. But I don't see anybody challenging point 1. Why does google have to give a number at all? If google can't/won't give an accurate result count, then they should give a result count at all. I don't care what technical limitations might complicate giving an accurate result count, that's no excuse for lying when silence is a perfectly valid choice. Obviously they provide the count for marketing reasons. That's an explanation for the lying, but not an excuse.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  > 2. It can't/won't be accurate. >3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to (sic) large. LOL, what? No way!
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    When I say the leap from 2 to 3 is dodgy, I meant that as a bit of dry understatement. It's insane. But to even get to point 2 you need to first assume point 1, which is that Google is somehow compelled to provide a result count. They aren't. They could simply remove the result count and not say anything about it, then they wouldn't ""need"" to lie about it.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  The number of pages in a search index and the number of results found were major selling points for search engines. I'd say that the count got carried forward in the last 20 years.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    As I said, it's for marketing. That's the explanation, but it's not an excuse. They should remove it, nobody is forcing them to keep it. They choose to keep it even though they know it's insanely inaccurate.
nostrademons 4y ago
Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page. My team removed the blue bar containing that text way back in 2010. You have to hit "Next" or otherwise visit page 2 to get it. And I'd bet the reason why it's still there (I left Search in 2014) is because < 0.1% of users ever hit the next page. Everybody else just refines their query to a different search. It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for. As a result, Google expends approximately zero engineering effort on pages 2-20 of the results - I know that in the 4 visual redesigns I worked on, we didn't touch them once. It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users. The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination. Ranking across the full result set is a very complex calculation, and it can depend on some factors that are basically random (eg. timeouts and failures in backend servers). It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different. This requires that the full result set be cached. You can cache 400-1000 results for each of the queries that the 0.1% of users who actually hit "Next" care about, but you'd have a big issue caching 2 billion results for each of those queries.
- nomel 4y ago
  > Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page. This is false for other search terms. Search for "meaning of life". At the top left of the first result page it says "About 10,620,000,000 results (0.56 seconds)". Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/SQq7Snl https://imgur.com/a/SQq7Snl Logged into Google, Safari 15.6.1. edit: Here's a good one: "starfish buttercup pickle mouse" Page 1 of 2 says > About 589,000 results (0.62 seconds) Page 2 of 2 says > Page 2 of about 22 results (0.36 seconds) Oops! Must have been one of those common "multiply by 26,772" errors. At the bottom of the page, it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed." with an option to show all results. With all results shown, the total result count goes to 59, so only off by 9,983x! But who's counting? Definitely not Google.
remote_phone 4y ago
In this thread are dozens of people complaining about something they would never use, ie going through a billion results. It’s really weird how hateful HN can be for no real reason.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I don't care that Google doesn't give me billions of results. I do care that Google is lying about giving me billions of results. Either give me a reasonably accurate result count, or no result count at all. The lie is an insult.
  - remote_phone 4y ago
    You are insulted very easily over extremely small things. Do you get insulted over the fact that food producers have been decreasing the size of their food servings while keeping the same price? For example, a “pint” of ice cream is no longer a pint, it’s 14 oz. And the size of OJ had been decreasing Constantly but the price stays the same. Here you are actually suffering a loss. You are being deceived into believing you are getting the same but you’re not. Are you upset and insulted about this? With Google all you’re not getting are the results you wouldn’t have used anyway. You don’t actually suffer a loss. And yet, this is what you’re insulted over?
dreamcompiler 4y ago
Sometimes I really want to see more than 10 results. I used to be able to set a flag that told Google "show me 100 results on the first page." But as of a couple of years ago, whenever I set that flag Google accuses me of being a bot and makes me solve a captcha. Thanks Google. I really enjoy solving puzzles just to get beyond your ad-sponsored search results. Just one of many reasons why my default search engine is DDG now. DDG kind of sucks but these days it sucks less than Google.
- pronlover723 4y ago
  Both Bing and DDG seem to have stop indexing porn since about 6 months ago. Search for "couple having sex" then set the filter to "past month". Zero results on bing and ddg. It started around late January, early February. Other things that would lead to porn also fail like "woman f*cking dildo", "shemale", that's all I tried. They'll show result, but if you filter for 24hrs, past week, past month, they're blank
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I have similarly bad captcha results elsewhere. Millionshort normally rejects my queries from my Linux desktop, and often it will go 5+ rounds, which exceeds my patience.
amelius 4y ago
Everyone knows that "purpose of life" has 42 results ...
kumarvvr 4y ago
Wow. True. It shows about 1.1 billion results. But on page 22, the results are 218 and is the last page. Never noticed this !
phendrenad2 4y ago
> Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence. I've seen this around a lot, but I have yet to see proof that it's a "lie" in any way. Perhaps provide some evidence if you have it? More likely, there ARE 2 million results, but they're not going to show them all to you, because you are not economically able to pay them enough to do so. Now, if you want to pay Google a billion dollars, you can probably get all 2 million search results. They'll probably deliver them on gold-plated floppy disks if you want. Anyway it ALSO it serves as an important hint that there are LOTS of results, and you should NARROW down your search. Wouldn't it be weirder if you searched for "meaning of life" and it said "200 results"?

alas44 4y ago

Could the number be valid from indexing standpoint but irrelevant search results are deemed unworthy of display to user? Unworthy + maybe costly on back-end side e.g. because infrequently accessed data is in cold storage?

kevincox 4y ago
That's exactly what it is. Each page is more expensive to serve than the last (it is basically joining a bunch of indexes for each term and then skipping the first N). At some number of pages they drew a line and decided that the value of these pages isn't worth the cost (and DoS vulnerability) to serve them.
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  Nevertheless, it's a dark pattern. They should make it clear to the user how many results are available to them.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    They are "available". Just the way to get there isn't by going through the result pages but by refining your search.
    - wolpoli 4y ago
      It made sense back then when you could tell Google the exact words that you are looking for. But now that Google drops random words from our query, it's not exactly easy to refine the search query.
- groffee 4y ago
  > At some number of pages they drew a line and decided that the value of these pages isn't worth the cost (and DoS vulnerability) to serve them. They have literally one job.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    To serve you the 5 millionth search result for "funny"? Unless you are going to directly pay for that server cost it just doesn't make sense, and it is such a rare use case that it doesn't even make sense for them to give you that option. They have to cut you off somewhere. When is the last time you legitimately wanted the 401th page of the search results? It will be more efficent for both you and Google if you instead refine your search query than paging through the results forever.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Pro tip. Never reply to someone who uses "literally" incorrectly.
      - iso1631 4y ago
        A definition of literally is literally one that is "not literally true", thus using literally in this case is literally correct https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        > is literally one that Does this literally mean not literally?
        iso1631 4y ago
        It is literally clear as literal mud
colpabar 4y ago
I was thinking this too. Not to claim google is trustworthy, but pagination with large search result sets can be tricky when you go back really far if the queries to fetch them are expensive. The count is probably a different system from the actual results, and the count switching may just be how they handle the 0.000000001% of people who try going to page 400. So the lie may not be how high the number is, but the expectation of being able to see all the results.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  That would mean that the lie is that they show a completely irrelevant number which paints Google as a very extensive and comprehensive search engine while hiding the relevant number which is always radically smaller. > the expectation of being able to see all the results. Which would not exist if Google weren't pushing this massive mystery number that we're currently, in this thread, only speculating about what it could be referring to. This expectation could be easily solved by showing the number of results that Google is planning to return to the user, and tossing out the number that means nothing to anyone.
- kevincox 4y ago
  > So the lie may not be how high the number is, but the expectation of being able to see all the results. The slight twist is that you can see all of the results. Just not by paging. You can refine your query to see them all. I'm sure the number is just an estimation, but it does have some value.

mortehu 4y ago

This comment could have been written in 1998. I think by now most people know how the result estimates work (i.e. not at all).

colpabar 4y ago
"most people" take the top results of a google search as gospel.

blastro 4y ago

wow, never noticed that before.

guestbest 4y ago

This is fraudulent marketing, but I’ve seen bing do this as well

jolmg 4y ago
Bing is worse in that it makes it seem like you can go to e.g. page 100 and will say stuff like "1,000-1,006 of 659,000,000 results", but it's really showing you the results from page 5. Then, for example, in page 5, 6, 7, etc. you can see the same results between them, just shuffled around. You can't even tell how many results you're really getting.
- badwolf 4y ago
  Gawd, the same results shuffled to different positions on every different page of results, and how they make ads and sponsored "results" almost impossible to distinguish... It's truly terrible.

summerlight 4y ago

This is mostly a technical limitation and has been placed since 1998. 99.99% of search queries won't go beyond result 100 then what's the point of showing the result 10000000 other than technological demonstration?

salawat 4y ago
It's called "showing an accurate representation of reality" Ya know, that whole thing indexes are for by definition. Oh, but if they did that they wouldn't have a convenient way to implement dropping something from public view either, so there's that.
inetknght 4y ago
Technical limitation or not, it is still a lie.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  It's not a lie. "There are eleventy badillion results" is a true statement, not a promise to show you all of them.
  - xdavidliu 4y ago
    By that same logic, businesses can advertise "sale, many items 90% off" but when you show up, nothing is 90% off, and you could argue that the business only claimed that the items existed, they never said they would actually sell it to you.
    - amelius 4y ago
      I'd be surprised if this didn't actually happen.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        There are laws (at least in the US) about advertising sales that prevent it from happening.

rudasn 4y ago

Not surprising though, as others have mentioned. GitHub does this too, if you click on the Issues page and change the search query it searches all of github, not just your own repos. But you can't go to the last page of the results (not sure about the max page number, but there is a limit and for good reasons).

rossjudson 4y ago
That's called "good engineering". It's a lot better than "excessive pedantry".

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

<query> | head -n 500

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago

I’m sure they could remove spam results if they wanted to, but what’s the incentive when alternative engines are mediocre and time wasting will mean you’re going to use their engine for longer.

btheshoe 4y ago

... who cares? Functionally, I have never gone beyond the 3rd search page when looking for a useful website. I can see how the search engine does find the astronomical number of search results, but then just decides for technical reasons to not display them. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.

AlbertCory 4y ago

The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? I joined Google in Nov. 2005, and "The Life of a Query" was one of the classes that everyone took. Even then, we were told that figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Maybe now it's 400, I don't know. What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

appletrotter 4y ago
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can? If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug. If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  > If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug. > If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature. It's a filtered mess. Search for test and then search for test test in two different tabs. Once the results appear, switch between those tabs. The estimates of results radically differ from each other, and the results are not shared between those two tabs. The tabs should return mostly identical results due to the keywords, but they are not even close to each other. If you look at the types of results shown between those two tabs, the issues with search results being filtered will be immediately shown. One tab will show 98% of the results filtered to show COVID-19 information with a little bit of results for sites that charge people to train for standardized tests. However, the other tab shows vastly different results about network speed tests, test.com, the word test at wikipedia, the definition of the word test, the etymology of the word test, etc.
cycomanic 4y ago
So you're saying it's incompetence not malice? Not sure if that makes it better.
cmeacham98 4y ago

3r3r3r1111111 4y ago

RobertRoberts 4y ago

Just tested this, it stops at page 22 with no more next... wow.

amelius 4y ago
They expect you to click an ad and forget all about your query before that page.

foobarian 4y ago

Most of the replies under this comment are invalid because of the words "About" in front of those statements. I love the word "about" - it's even more slippery than "many," which implies non-zero.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
I am about 10 miles tall. (This exaggeration is about 1 million times less severe than Google's.)

1970-01-01 4y ago

Very interesting. Just tried it with "covid-19" and its true. About 13,460,000,000 results (1.35 seconds) .. Page 2 of about 163 results (1.15 seconds) >"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."< .. About 12,620,000,000 results (1.26 seconds) .. Page 4 of about 361 results (1.75 seconds)

texasbigdata 4y ago
It's like the sticker that says "this amp goes to 11". Google just went further! Somewhere a product manager is beaming with pride
therein 4y ago
Yeah, indeed. And not only on controversial topics either. Check these videos out. TruthStream's production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyJB45ewvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyJB45ewvU Jimmy from BrightInsight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dannysullivan 4y ago

I work for Google Search. The counts we show for results are estimated. They get more refined when you go deeper into the results. But yes, there are still likely to be millions of results for many things you query -- and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those. So we show usually up to around 40 pages / 400 of these. We have a help page about this here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785

c7b 4y ago
Thanks for posting here. Some questions: can you confirm that the estimates are unbiased in the statistical sense? Do you have an API for accessing the other ones, the help page for my locale doesn't mention anything? If not, how do you justify showing a very high number of results that users can't access?
- nonasktell 4y ago
  it's probably a protection against scraping and yeah there is probably billions of mentions of any single word out there if you count the computer generated content
rufus_foreman 4y ago
So when I google "cows" and it says "Page 2 of about 1,210,000,000 results" you know full well you aren't going to show anywhere near 1,201,000,000 results yet you program it to display that? And in fact it only shows "about 231 results" which is 0.000019234% of 1,210,000,000 results. That doesn't sound like an estimate to me. To me, that is intentional misleading.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  It’s a signal that your search is generic. You can refine down more and get some hint of that. Compare: “Cows” “Cows New York” “Cows Bronx New York” “Cows Bronx New York major deegan expressway” This is a dumb example, but the count drops as the search is refined. You can use this to guide a specific search as well… in a tech example, if you search for a specific log entry while troubleshooting you might get 3 results tbat appear random. Remove elements of the search and you’ll get more results and relevance.

treeman79 4y ago

They are also answering questions. Not going to source . But answers are way off. Seen many times where it’s pulling from fan fiction, Etc

MichaelCollins 4y ago

You got a lot of responses telling you why Google can't or doesn't want to provide an accurate result count. I guess the logic is: 1. Google has to return a result count. 2. It can't/won't be accurate. 3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to large. The jump from 2 to 3 is dodgy and I see people questioning it. But I don't see anybody challenging point 1. Why does google have to give a number at all? If google can't/won't give an accurate result count, then they should give a result count at all. I don't care what technical limitations might complicate giving an accurate result count, that's no excuse for lying when silence is a perfectly valid choice. Obviously they provide the count for marketing reasons. That's an explanation for the lying, but not an excuse.

moralestapia 4y ago
> 2. It can't/won't be accurate. >3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to (sic) large. LOL, what? No way!
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  When I say the leap from 2 to 3 is dodgy, I meant that as a bit of dry understatement. It's insane. But to even get to point 2 you need to first assume point 1, which is that Google is somehow compelled to provide a result count. They aren't. They could simply remove the result count and not say anything about it, then they wouldn't ""need"" to lie about it.
wolpoli 4y ago
The number of pages in a search index and the number of results found were major selling points for search engines. I'd say that the count got carried forward in the last 20 years.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  As I said, it's for marketing. That's the explanation, but it's not an excuse. They should remove it, nobody is forcing them to keep it. They choose to keep it even though they know it's insanely inaccurate.

nostrademons 4y ago

Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page. My team removed the blue bar containing that text way back in 2010. You have to hit "Next" or otherwise visit page 2 to get it. And I'd bet the reason why it's still there (I left Search in 2014) is because < 0.1% of users ever hit the next page. Everybody else just refines their query to a different search. It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for. As a result, Google expends approximately zero engineering effort on pages 2-20 of the results - I know that in the 4 visual redesigns I worked on, we didn't touch them once. It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users. The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination. Ranking across the full result set is a very complex calculation, and it can depend on some factors that are basically random (eg. timeouts and failures in backend servers). It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different. This requires that the full result set be cached. You can cache 400-1000 results for each of the queries that the 0.1% of users who actually hit "Next" care about, but you'd have a big issue caching 2 billion results for each of those queries.

nomel 4y ago
> Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page. This is false for other search terms. Search for "meaning of life". At the top left of the first result page it says "About 10,620,000,000 results (0.56 seconds)". Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/SQq7Snl https://imgur.com/a/SQq7Snl Logged into Google, Safari 15.6.1. edit: Here's a good one: "starfish buttercup pickle mouse" Page 1 of 2 says > About 589,000 results (0.62 seconds) Page 2 of 2 says > Page 2 of about 22 results (0.36 seconds) Oops! Must have been one of those common "multiply by 26,772" errors. At the bottom of the page, it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed." with an option to show all results. With all results shown, the total result count goes to 59, so only off by 9,983x! But who's counting? Definitely not Google.

remote_phone 4y ago

In this thread are dozens of people complaining about something they would never use, ie going through a billion results. It’s really weird how hateful HN can be for no real reason.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
I don't care that Google doesn't give me billions of results. I do care that Google is lying about giving me billions of results. Either give me a reasonably accurate result count, or no result count at all. The lie is an insult.
- remote_phone 4y ago
  You are insulted very easily over extremely small things. Do you get insulted over the fact that food producers have been decreasing the size of their food servings while keeping the same price? For example, a “pint” of ice cream is no longer a pint, it’s 14 oz. And the size of OJ had been decreasing Constantly but the price stays the same. Here you are actually suffering a loss. You are being deceived into believing you are getting the same but you’re not. Are you upset and insulted about this? With Google all you’re not getting are the results you wouldn’t have used anyway. You don’t actually suffer a loss. And yet, this is what you’re insulted over?

dreamcompiler 4y ago

Sometimes I really want to see more than 10 results. I used to be able to set a flag that told Google "show me 100 results on the first page." But as of a couple of years ago, whenever I set that flag Google accuses me of being a bot and makes me solve a captcha. Thanks Google. I really enjoy solving puzzles just to get beyond your ad-sponsored search results. Just one of many reasons why my default search engine is DDG now. DDG kind of sucks but these days it sucks less than Google.

pronlover723 4y ago
Both Bing and DDG seem to have stop indexing porn since about 6 months ago. Search for "couple having sex" then set the filter to "past month". Zero results on bing and ddg. It started around late January, early February. Other things that would lead to porn also fail like "woman f*cking dildo", "shemale", that's all I tried. They'll show result, but if you filter for 24hrs, past week, past month, they're blank
QuarterReptile 4y ago
Unfortunately, I have similarly bad captcha results elsewhere. Millionshort normally rejects my queries from my Linux desktop, and often it will go 5+ rounds, which exceeds my patience.

amelius 4y ago

Everyone knows that "purpose of life" has 42 results ...

kumarvvr 4y ago

Wow. True. It shows about 1.1 billion results. But on page 22, the results are 218 and is the last page. Never noticed this !

phendrenad2 4y ago

> Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence. I've seen this around a lot, but I have yet to see proof that it's a "lie" in any way. Perhaps provide some evidence if you have it? More likely, there ARE 2 million results, but they're not going to show them all to you, because you are not economically able to pay them enough to do so. Now, if you want to pay Google a billion dollars, you can probably get all 2 million search results. They'll probably deliver them on gold-plated floppy disks if you want. Anyway it ALSO it serves as an important hint that there are LOTS of results, and you should NARROW down your search. Wouldn't it be weirder if you searched for "meaning of life" and it said "200 results"?