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Similarly I think most would expect result to imply retrievability.
by jjcon 4y ago
Similarly I think most would expect result to imply retrievability.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tshaddox 4y agoHow so? It makes perfect sense to say "there are 1 million results but you can only access 1,000 of them" but it's complete nonsense to say "we are selling 1 million items but we are only selling 1,000 of them."
- inetknght 4y ago> It makes perfect sense to say "there are 1 million results but you can only access 1,000 of them" Except that's _not_ what Google is saying. Google is saying there are 1 million results and won't tell you that you can only access the first N.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoWhere do you see Google's implied or explicit promise to provide with you every result they've found?
- inetknght 4y ago> Where do you see Google's implied promise to provide with you every result The implied promise is the button that says "Search". 1. It's a search engine. Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results. 2. Searching with other tools works. Use `grep` or your computer's local search feature and it will give you all of the results. 3. If I go through my old email, I can download literally every email. I can search literally every email, for hundreds of thousands of email.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago> Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results. True. But that's not the question, is it? The question is whether only giving you the "first" N of the results makes it useless, or something else... Nobody, I think, is contesting, that search in some contexts is always expected to provide you with access to everything that is found. The issue is whether that can be expected to apply to a case where 10M results are found, and if not, what the cutoff point ought to be ...
- inetknght 4y ago> > > Where do you see Google's implied promise to provide with you every result > > The implied promise is the button that says "Search". > True. But that's not the question, is it? You wanna stop moving the goalposts?
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoI will if you will. You said: > Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results. but nobody has suggested that Google doesn't provide any results.
- xdavidliu 4y agowould you say it's at least misleading to say that there are 10 billion results? If not, how far would it have to go before you would consider it misleading?
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoi would call it a tease. i don't (currently) have any particular reason to disbelieve the result count. but under some circumstances i'd be pissed that google would not show me more than 500.
- leokennis 4y agoImagine you search Amazon for “blue baseball cap”, they say they found 1,234 items and then you could only see and purchase 10… Why say you have 10,000,000 search results if you only intend to show 100? What’s the use of the number 10,000,000? To inspire a sense of awe in the user, that you then cannot make good on? To inform the user on some technicality? To me this feels like Google is selling a car that can technically drive 250 km/h but is limited at 150 km/h, and then advertising it as “Do you love driving 250 km/h? Then buy the Google car!”
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoActually, if the number actually meant something I would find it very useful. If google said there were actually just 1234 results for my search, my attitude towards checking things much further down the list would be quite different than if it said there are 123,456,789 results. With a number like that, I know that "deep searching" is likely to be fruitless, which is paradoxical but so is life. The problem is that I'm not convinced that the result count actually means what we generally think it does.