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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 th

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
I expect that the estimate is more accurate than "we said 11000 but the actual result was 1000". Of course I understand it isn't going to be perfect, but that's two orders of magnitude off.
- k3ylebe3nzle 4y ago
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  > the actual result was 1000. Wrong. I tried "the meaning of life" on Google just now. It said: About 9,890,000,000 results (0.66 seconds) Where is the claim that you will be able to scroll through 9,890,000,000 results? There is plenty to complain about with Google, and the rest of this thread shows you some of it. It will be a lot more productive for you to focus on some of that.
  - Sayrus 4y ago
    That's not the issue OP has. The issue is that the claim changes when you reach the last page. For "purpose of life" it changes from "Page 22 of about 12,270,000,000 results" to "Page 23 of about 226 results".
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you're trying to say, how else would I interpret "9,890,000,000 results" than "there are 9.89 billion results for that query (that you could theoretically scroll through)"?
    - sulam 4y ago
      I would interpret it as an invitation to refine my search query, because that’s too many results for me to usefully filter.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
        Yes, but a reasonable person would likely think that there is that many results to wade through if they so chose.
k3ylebe3nzle 4y ago
kunwon1 4y ago
Isn't this how all search engines have worked for most of the history of internet search? I was an avid user of altavista, hotbot, yahoo, and early google. I recall that I was always able to 'page' through an absurd number of results. But I am old and have a bad memory, maybe I'm wrong
tboyd47 4y ago
I think in 2022 we can expect the most profitable Internet company to return a count of search results more accurate than 4 orders of magnitude off.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  They are saying there are that many results but Google isn't going to serve some random dude all of them.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Then why are they giving people useless information that they didn't ask for?
    - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
      As other have suggested to show your search was too broad and you should refine it. (and probably to brag too)
  - tboyd47 4y ago
    Is there a special cheat code to unlock them?
- lrem 4y ago
  Do you seriously think that the whole Internet contains exactly 400 pages mentioning "the purpose of life", including synonyms? ;)
  - onion2k 4y ago
    Google does.
c7b 4y ago
> figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Sounds like they're using biased estimators for the number of search results. If the estimates weren't biased, the underestimated numbers would balance out the overestimated ones, so for every query where they fall short by 2 billion there would be one that has two billion more hits than shown by the UI (or two billion with one hit more). > The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? If it's true that they show biased estimates, I'd say that's a pretty adequate description.
mrkramer 4y ago
Google limits number of search results to between 300 and 400[0] and yea as you know the reason is it is technically challenging, expensive and most probably unnecessary to show all results but devil is in the details or in this case information gem/s are on the 98th page or something like that :) [0] https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-google-now-limits-search-results-to-only-300-to-400-links/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-googl...
overboard2 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? No, I'd expect that it would be able to generate subsequent pages on the fly.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Why would you expect that. Idk what technoligies google uses, but generally its kind of hard to skip directly to the i'th result of a full text index efficiently.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    People expect it because it's the expectation they are told to have. When you see "1 of 200,000,000 results" you think you can scroll through all of them. If Google would say "1 of over 1000 results" and cut off at page 10 of 100 results with a nice message saying "please refine your search query if you haven't found what you're looking for," nobody here would be complaining.
    - dlp211 4y ago
      Google has done this since the beginning of Google and it is the first time that I have ever seen this is come up. This is something that just doesn't matter.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - bawolff 4y ago
      Can you name a single site that works this way (i.e. a site offering full text search which allows you to page through more than 100,000 results of the full text search)? I appreciate that everyone has different life experiences that lead to different expectations, but for me personally it would go without saying that google would not let you view all results to a query that returns million of results.
leokennis 4y ago
If Google determines that 99.999% of the people will never go beyond result 400, and 99.998% of the people find the result they were looking for in these 400 results, then what’s the use of showing those users there are “about 200,000,000 results”?
- wolpoli 4y ago
  Yes, and if 99.999% of the people will never go beyond result 400, then logically, it wouldn't be tough for Google to offer the 0.001% the ability to go beyond result 400. I am sure those determined users wouldn't mind waiting a few more seconds for Google to compute those results.
  - debesyla 4y ago
    This does make me wonder: what would the actual statistic for 400+ theoretical page visits be? Would there be a single person in a world who would ever reach such page? (I mean, damn, if every page shows 10 results, there would be 400 clicks in the same page + 4000 lines of results. You would need another search engine to sift through such amount of results in any sane amount of time...)
    - wolpoli 4y ago
      There is a good chance that someone could get to the 400th page if there were around a total of 8000-10000 hits for an for a obscure topic. It would be a multi-day effort, and I am sure that person would wish that they could search within the result or group the result by some properties.
- tomrod 4y ago
  The question us non-Googlers are asking, right here ^ How does it serve the user? If it doesn't, what is the purpose?
matheusmoreira 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? Yes.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Perhaps after wading through a billion search results, you would actually find the meaning of life, but dismiss it to make a pedantic point.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    What's so pedantic about expecting a search engine to actually be able to return the results it has found? What if I'm curious to see what matches Google considers irrelevant enough to place in the billionth results page?
    - debesyla 4y ago
      The absurdity of it? Is the theoretical amount of results the important part? Or the results itself? Let's imagine you go to your imaginary mentor to ask a question. Your mentor can give you thousands of answers - they are a creative person - would you really even care about all those answers, or do you want only one or few (more) accurate? But fair point, if I were an immortal person with infinite amount of time I too would want to see ALL the results, not only the "best".
      - matheusmoreira 4y ago
        My imaginary mentor doesn't tell me they have a billion different answers to my question. Would you use an SQL database that doesn't return a proper result set to your query or take LIMIT and OFFSET into account?
        debesyla 4y ago
        Hmm... If the database somehow manages to still do what I need it to do - yeah, sure? (But I may be strange here, dunno. I am alright with using suboptimal tools - like WordPress for my eshop, haha...)
wowokay 4y ago
No, I think most of us though google was a more innovative company that could create a way to share that many results, feels more like an EA move where google stopped trying years ago and just went into search maintance mode.
tomrod 4y ago
> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? No, I consider it accurate. I still consider Google to be marginally useful these days, but the quality has slipped and the UX has yet to keep pace. > 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? Yes, that is what people expect when someone says "I found a billion hits on what you're looking for, here is the pile." How does this being wholly inaccurate by orders of magnitude to what the user can retrieve benefit the user?
- rossjudson 4y ago
  No, that's what you expect. And you are weird. Which is fine.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Alone, I am a person. But clearly I am not the only one here that perceives this, and therefore "people" works. Uninteresting semantics intended to be clever from both of us aside, you also missed that, although it is a little lie repeated many times, the datapoint still offers no benefit to the user.
debesyla 4y ago
Yes, it seems like a lot of people here do want to read whole 2 billion results.
code_duck 4y ago
How long would it take to view 2 billion results at 20 per page? I’m thinking somewhere between 100 and 200 years.
bleuchase 4y ago
> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? No, it’s 100% accurate. Your response is delusional and a poor attempt at manipulation. > 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 isn’t possible for users to see those results then you should only display the number of results that can be accessed. That would be “not lying” in this case.

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

I expect that the estimate is more accurate than "we said 11000 but the actual result was 1000". Of course I understand it isn't going to be perfect, but that's two orders of magnitude off.

k3ylebe3nzle 4y ago
AlbertCory 4y ago
> the actual result was 1000. Wrong. I tried "the meaning of life" on Google just now. It said: About 9,890,000,000 results (0.66 seconds) Where is the claim that you will be able to scroll through 9,890,000,000 results? There is plenty to complain about with Google, and the rest of this thread shows you some of it. It will be a lot more productive for you to focus on some of that.
- Sayrus 4y ago
  That's not the issue OP has. The issue is that the claim changes when you reach the last page. For "purpose of life" it changes from "Page 22 of about 12,270,000,000 results" to "Page 23 of about 226 results".
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to say, how else would I interpret "9,890,000,000 results" than "there are 9.89 billion results for that query (that you could theoretically scroll through)"?
  - sulam 4y ago
    I would interpret it as an invitation to refine my search query, because that’s too many results for me to usefully filter.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      Yes, but a reasonable person would likely think that there is that many results to wade through if they so chose.

k3ylebe3nzle 4y ago

kunwon1 4y ago

Isn't this how all search engines have worked for most of the history of internet search? I was an avid user of altavista, hotbot, yahoo, and early google. I recall that I was always able to 'page' through an absurd number of results. But I am old and have a bad memory, maybe I'm wrong

tboyd47 4y ago

I think in 2022 we can expect the most profitable Internet company to return a count of search results more accurate than 4 orders of magnitude off.

tick_tock_tick 4y ago
They are saying there are that many results but Google isn't going to serve some random dude all of them.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Then why are they giving people useless information that they didn't ask for?
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    As other have suggested to show your search was too broad and you should refine it. (and probably to brag too)
- tboyd47 4y ago
  Is there a special cheat code to unlock them?
lrem 4y ago
Do you seriously think that the whole Internet contains exactly 400 pages mentioning "the purpose of life", including synonyms? ;)
- onion2k 4y ago
  Google does.

c7b 4y ago

> figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Sounds like they're using biased estimators for the number of search results. If the estimates weren't biased, the underestimated numbers would balance out the overestimated ones, so for every query where they fall short by 2 billion there would be one that has two billion more hits than shown by the UI (or two billion with one hit more). > The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? If it's true that they show biased estimates, I'd say that's a pretty adequate description.

mrkramer 4y ago

Google limits number of search results to between 300 and 400[0] and yea as you know the reason is it is technically challenging, expensive and most probably unnecessary to show all results but devil is in the details or in this case information gem/s are on the 98th page or something like that :) [0] https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-google-now-limits-search-results-to-only-300-to-400-links/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-googl...

overboard2 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? No, I'd expect that it would be able to generate subsequent pages on the fly.

bawolff 4y ago
Why would you expect that. Idk what technoligies google uses, but generally its kind of hard to skip directly to the i'th result of a full text index efficiently.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  People expect it because it's the expectation they are told to have. When you see "1 of 200,000,000 results" you think you can scroll through all of them. If Google would say "1 of over 1000 results" and cut off at page 10 of 100 results with a nice message saying "please refine your search query if you haven't found what you're looking for," nobody here would be complaining.
  - dlp211 4y ago
    Google has done this since the beginning of Google and it is the first time that I have ever seen this is come up. This is something that just doesn't matter.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - bawolff 4y ago
    Can you name a single site that works this way (i.e. a site offering full text search which allows you to page through more than 100,000 results of the full text search)? I appreciate that everyone has different life experiences that lead to different expectations, but for me personally it would go without saying that google would not let you view all results to a query that returns million of results.

leokennis 4y ago

If Google determines that 99.999% of the people will never go beyond result 400, and 99.998% of the people find the result they were looking for in these 400 results, then what’s the use of showing those users there are “about 200,000,000 results”?

wolpoli 4y ago
Yes, and if 99.999% of the people will never go beyond result 400, then logically, it wouldn't be tough for Google to offer the 0.001% the ability to go beyond result 400. I am sure those determined users wouldn't mind waiting a few more seconds for Google to compute those results.
- debesyla 4y ago
  This does make me wonder: what would the actual statistic for 400+ theoretical page visits be? Would there be a single person in a world who would ever reach such page? (I mean, damn, if every page shows 10 results, there would be 400 clicks in the same page + 4000 lines of results. You would need another search engine to sift through such amount of results in any sane amount of time...)
  - wolpoli 4y ago
    There is a good chance that someone could get to the 400th page if there were around a total of 8000-10000 hits for an for a obscure topic. It would be a multi-day effort, and I am sure that person would wish that they could search within the result or group the result by some properties.
tomrod 4y ago
The question us non-Googlers are asking, right here ^ How does it serve the user? If it doesn't, what is the purpose?

matheusmoreira 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? Yes.

Spooky23 4y ago
Perhaps after wading through a billion search results, you would actually find the meaning of life, but dismiss it to make a pedantic point.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  What's so pedantic about expecting a search engine to actually be able to return the results it has found? What if I'm curious to see what matches Google considers irrelevant enough to place in the billionth results page?
  - debesyla 4y ago
    The absurdity of it? Is the theoretical amount of results the important part? Or the results itself? Let's imagine you go to your imaginary mentor to ask a question. Your mentor can give you thousands of answers - they are a creative person - would you really even care about all those answers, or do you want only one or few (more) accurate? But fair point, if I were an immortal person with infinite amount of time I too would want to see ALL the results, not only the "best".
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      My imaginary mentor doesn't tell me they have a billion different answers to my question. Would you use an SQL database that doesn't return a proper result set to your query or take LIMIT and OFFSET into account?
      - debesyla 4y ago
        Hmm... If the database somehow manages to still do what I need it to do - yeah, sure? (But I may be strange here, dunno. I am alright with using suboptimal tools - like WordPress for my eshop, haha...)

wowokay 4y ago

No, I think most of us though google was a more innovative company that could create a way to share that many results, feels more like an EA move where google stopped trying years ago and just went into search maintance mode.

tomrod 4y ago

> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? No, I consider it accurate. I still consider Google to be marginally useful these days, but the quality has slipped and the UX has yet to keep pace. > 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? Yes, that is what people expect when someone says "I found a billion hits on what you're looking for, here is the pile." How does this being wholly inaccurate by orders of magnitude to what the user can retrieve benefit the user?

rossjudson 4y ago
No, that's what you expect. And you are weird. Which is fine.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Alone, I am a person. But clearly I am not the only one here that perceives this, and therefore "people" works. Uninteresting semantics intended to be clever from both of us aside, you also missed that, although it is a little lie repeated many times, the datapoint still offers no benefit to the user.

debesyla 4y ago

Yes, it seems like a lot of people here do want to read whole 2 billion results.

code_duck 4y ago

How long would it take to view 2 billion results at 20 per page? I’m thinking somewhere between 100 and 200 years.

bleuchase 4y ago

> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think? No, it’s 100% accurate. Your response is delusional and a poor attempt at manipulation. > 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 isn’t possible for users to see those results then you should only display the number of results that can be accessed. That would be “not lying” in this case.