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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 like

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.
  - tolmasky 4y ago
    > It’s a signal that your search is generic. You can refine down more and get some hint of that. 1. I doubt the common person infers this from the “X results” UI, especially considering this has a literal meaning in most other search interfaces where they encounter this terminology. In fact, you don’t even have to compare it to other services, as apparently on the next page of Google results the meaning changes to the traditional literal interpretation. So on page 1 it is a weird hint, but on page 2 it is a precise count? 2. Even if that’s the purpose of this blurb, I actually still don’t know how generic my query is. I have no idea what the average result count is, so I don’t know if this is a lot or not. It’s certainly not the case that my “successful queries” are ones where there’s exactly one result, or just a few. Ironically enough, it’s the opposite: I only get so few results when I’m searching for something that’s really hard to find and Google is giving me a couple wrong results (in fact Google uses “no good matches” language in this case). Usually when I find something quickly it is merely the top result of many results. 3. If the intent is to tell me my query is pretty generic, then just say that, don’t imply it through language that has a literal meaning in all other interfaces I encounter it. Note that my gripe with this UI is not about whether it is misleading or not, but merely that if its intended purpose is to give me some hint as to how good my query is, it is not doing a good job of that.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      There’s no subjective judgement. No rule exists that says I need to have a narrow query. If they said your query was too broad or arrow, you would be complaining about that. End of the day, it’s a number with some utility that is ignored or amusing to the majority of people. Apparently it’s very irritating to some slice of people as well.
      - tolmasky 4y ago
        But the original argument was that it was intended to tell me how generic it was? I'm just saying that I have no idea of that from that number since I don't have appropriate context. It's like a teacher telling me my kid got 10 questions right on a test. OK... out of how many? Out of 10? Or out of 100? And then that teacher being like "hey hey hey, I didn't know this was such a touchy subject. I'm just telling you your kid got 10 questions right. It's a number with some utility. If you don't like it, just ignore it." It's separately weird that the number means something different on page 1 than page 2. It's not like I lose sleep over this, I honestly wasn't even aware that the intended purpose was for it to be a "how generic is this query" marker until you posted that, so I guess I am already ignoring it. I'm just saying that if that is the intended purpose, it fails completely.
- themitigating 4y ago
  How is it misleading? It's an estimate of the total results, it doesn't say it's going to display them
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    "I'll sell you about 1,201,000,000 paper clips." "OK." ships 231 paper clips "Hey I only got 231 paper clips, not 1,201,000,000." "That's right. 1,201,000,000 was an estimate." "You said about. So you estimated 1,201,000,000 paper clips but you actually only had 231?" "No, I had the full 1,201,000,000. I sold them to you but I didn't say I would ship all of them. What kind of idiot uses more than a few hundred paper clips anyway? Plus, it saves us money on shipping costs."
    - knorker 4y ago
      You're reading into this something I'm not. Waiter: What will you have this evening? Guest: Everything looks good Ok, everything, coming right up.
      - brandonmenc 4y ago
        You're just totally flipping the roles, so of course your version sounds absurd.
    - westurner 4y ago
      You haven't paid Google for search: there is no sale of product or service to you, the user using free services for free. You haven't signed any agreement with Google for search services. Google hasn't signed any agreement for future performance with you. Google is not obligated to count every search result of every free search query. You are not entitled to such resource-intensive queries. How much does COUNT() on a full table scan of billions of rows - with snippets - cost you on BigQuery or a similar pay-for-query-resources service?
      - rufus_foreman 4y ago
- lossolo 4y ago
  > of about 1,210,000,000 results I always read this as: "When we were crawling all the internet this phrase you are looking for was found in around 1.2 billion pages"
  - kyleee 4y ago
    why can't i then spend the next year of my life paging through them?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - tomrod 4y ago
    And being a search engine that provides links relevant to said phrase, reporting what they found is their anticipated deliverable.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    I don't think that's the correct interpretation though, because it states they are the results of your search that are being returned to you, not the content of the wider internet. And if they just flubbed the language but their intention was that it is an estimate of the internet or their index that they never intended to provide you with, the last page wouldn't change to "Page 23 of about 221 results".
- antonvs 4y ago
  > It’s a signal that your search is generic. Talk about bad user interface design. Why are you trying to defend this silly practice?
riversflow 4y ago
This is absolutely trash and essentially false advertising. Saying there are 1M+ results but then only having 400 viewable is straight up misrepresenting your product. > That’s hundreds of results and usually enough for deep research needs. You can enter a related query to refine your search and learn more. is both patronizing and offensive. 400 result is 4 pages of 100 hits, the way literally anyone who does research on google is going to use it(I haven't used a 10 hit Google page in well over a decade). Not only that, I can browse through 4 pages in like 5 minutes, really really inadequate for "deep research needs", and really anything beyond cursory convenience linking. I've completely dismissed Google Search for in depth topics as a result because of the multiple occasions I tried in vain to find a page I'd visited previously with Google (that I ended up finding again with browser history) that just couldn't be found, even going back and trying to make a search that works. > and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those. this is totally fair but 400 is just way way too few, if you bumped it up to 4k that would be a step in the right direction. Additionally, by my thinking, Google is missing out on the people who are willing to wade through thousands of search results to find quality content, as it stands now those pages have very little way to break into the top 400, but a complex search term followed by a user wading deep into the results to find a specific page where they go and don't return would seem to show any extremely strong signal that that specific page should probably be ranked somewhat higher.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  This is a very bizarre comment. They aren't saying there are 1M+ results that you can access. Who would even want to do that? The number is to give you an idea of how narrow your search was. This reminds me of when I and a couple of other people watched someone look through 10 whole pages of Google results. Totally insane. But it got even crazier - he actually found the thing he was looking for on the 10th page! Doubly unbelievable.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    I regularly look through 10+ pages of results in Google scholar and Google books. (Google web search has gotten much worse so I don't much use it anymore, but I used to look 10+ pages into Google web searches a decade ago.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tigershark 4y ago
Ah ok, so this is why after a certain amount of clicks of the mouse I am at the end of the Internet. I still remember the time when Internet was much bigger than 40 clicks. Hopefully someone will disrupt you soon and give us back the real Internet.
- svachalek 4y ago
  Although they still massively dominate the market, the competition is out there. While it wasn't that long ago where nobody else's search results were anywhere near as good, my experience lately is the opposite -- it's hard to do worse than Google results.
  - kyleee 4y ago
    yep, and here's to hoping that trend continues and google search dies out
onion2k 4y ago
If you're saying 2 billion when you know there are 'millions' your estimates are off by a factor of 2000. If you can really only show 400 results then the estimate is off by a factor of several million. Maybe that's just how Google Search works, but the story points on your JIRA tickets must be a sight to see. :)
_yb2s 4y ago
It's dishonest to show an estimate that is orders of magnitude off, and not even mention this with something like a +/- standard deviation. I can't imagine how something that has only hundreds of real hits could have an estimate of hundreds of thousands. Why not just drop this estimate altogether?
Waterluvian 4y ago
Do you mind clarifying why they’re off by a bajillion percent? Ie. If this isn’t maliciousness or incompetence, what is it?
- dataflow 4y ago
  I have no idea what's going on in the algorithm but it's not hard to imagine extrapolation of this sort: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- tomrod 4y ago
  Not the OP. My speculation is they justify it internally as defense against scrapers. What can you do? Dunno
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Oh that’s a clever thought. I didn’t consider that angle.
- utopcell 4y ago
  > If this isn’t maliciousness or incompetence, what is it? Expensive to calculate, for something nobody really cares about anymore.
verisimi 4y ago
The message is that you cannot verify what you are told, you just get what you're given. And what part you are given is an illusion that there are more results. Just trust Google.... what could go wrong? Let's not forget, that Eric Schmidt said that more than 1 result is a bug. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 This touches on the scope and hubris of Google and other companies that mediate reality for us. They think they have 'the truth', they know it and will give it to us, and if we refuse their truth, they will attempt to train us until we get it, in schools, the workplace, online, etc. It's also why they will become irrelevant. If there is nothing organic about their results because the algo filters thoughtcrime ideas out, people will continue to move away. Thank god. I personally use presearch and feel happier that the results are more natural. But nothing is perfect.
DocTomoe 4y ago
How inaccurate does an estimation have to be before it becomes a lie? What happens when a bank teller asks me during a credit application how many assets I have and I estimate about 10 billion bucks, when it later turns out I own the three dollars in my wallet and a strip of chewing gum? Am I (criminally) liable in that case?
tehbeard 4y ago
Not so much ballpark estimates as grains of protons in the multiverse then...
IncRnd 4y ago
Spending 5 minutes performing google searches shows that isn't even close to the truth. The number displayed at the top of the screen is fabricated. Searching for [google] states about 25 billion results, but it can only show me two pages of search results. Searching for [meaning of life] states about 10 billion results, but it can only show me 212 results. Searching for [meaning of life life] states about 7 billions results, but it can only show me 184 results. It is impossible that these results are correct. They are clearly filtered, and the count of results is inflated for every single search. Clicking on the text you recommended to expand all search results doesn't do that. It still limits the results, just to 300-400 instead of 200. In no case I tested could I get to more than 20 pages of results.
- rossjudson 4y ago
  I feel like you spend a lot of time getting angry at inanimate objects.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    You're projecting your beliefs without cause onto a person over the Internet. I do not feel any anger whatsoever and do not care about Google or how they perform searches.
omgomgomgomg 4y ago
Well,but a consistent estimate of millions of results and then showing 400 is a rather bad estimate. If the search results would be as bad as the estimates, you would have no business. It seems like the high numbers are displayed to mislead about the speed and efficiency of the search, google knows no human will go through 10 thousands of result pages. And ads are only sold for page 1.
jasfi 4y ago
My guess is that this is to prevent bots abusing infinite results pages. Possibly those that would scrape ranked results for a query.

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.
- tolmasky 4y ago
  > It’s a signal that your search is generic. You can refine down more and get some hint of that. 1. I doubt the common person infers this from the “X results” UI, especially considering this has a literal meaning in most other search interfaces where they encounter this terminology. In fact, you don’t even have to compare it to other services, as apparently on the next page of Google results the meaning changes to the traditional literal interpretation. So on page 1 it is a weird hint, but on page 2 it is a precise count? 2. Even if that’s the purpose of this blurb, I actually still don’t know how generic my query is. I have no idea what the average result count is, so I don’t know if this is a lot or not. It’s certainly not the case that my “successful queries” are ones where there’s exactly one result, or just a few. Ironically enough, it’s the opposite: I only get so few results when I’m searching for something that’s really hard to find and Google is giving me a couple wrong results (in fact Google uses “no good matches” language in this case). Usually when I find something quickly it is merely the top result of many results. 3. If the intent is to tell me my query is pretty generic, then just say that, don’t imply it through language that has a literal meaning in all other interfaces I encounter it. Note that my gripe with this UI is not about whether it is misleading or not, but merely that if its intended purpose is to give me some hint as to how good my query is, it is not doing a good job of that.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    There’s no subjective judgement. No rule exists that says I need to have a narrow query. If they said your query was too broad or arrow, you would be complaining about that. End of the day, it’s a number with some utility that is ignored or amusing to the majority of people. Apparently it’s very irritating to some slice of people as well.
    - tolmasky 4y ago
      But the original argument was that it was intended to tell me how generic it was? I'm just saying that I have no idea of that from that number since I don't have appropriate context. It's like a teacher telling me my kid got 10 questions right on a test. OK... out of how many? Out of 10? Or out of 100? And then that teacher being like "hey hey hey, I didn't know this was such a touchy subject. I'm just telling you your kid got 10 questions right. It's a number with some utility. If you don't like it, just ignore it." It's separately weird that the number means something different on page 1 than page 2. It's not like I lose sleep over this, I honestly wasn't even aware that the intended purpose was for it to be a "how generic is this query" marker until you posted that, so I guess I am already ignoring it. I'm just saying that if that is the intended purpose, it fails completely.
themitigating 4y ago
How is it misleading? It's an estimate of the total results, it doesn't say it's going to display them
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  "I'll sell you about 1,201,000,000 paper clips." "OK." ships 231 paper clips "Hey I only got 231 paper clips, not 1,201,000,000." "That's right. 1,201,000,000 was an estimate." "You said about. So you estimated 1,201,000,000 paper clips but you actually only had 231?" "No, I had the full 1,201,000,000. I sold them to you but I didn't say I would ship all of them. What kind of idiot uses more than a few hundred paper clips anyway? Plus, it saves us money on shipping costs."
  - knorker 4y ago
    You're reading into this something I'm not. Waiter: What will you have this evening? Guest: Everything looks good Ok, everything, coming right up.
    - brandonmenc 4y ago
      You're just totally flipping the roles, so of course your version sounds absurd.
  - westurner 4y ago
    You haven't paid Google for search: there is no sale of product or service to you, the user using free services for free. You haven't signed any agreement with Google for search services. Google hasn't signed any agreement for future performance with you. Google is not obligated to count every search result of every free search query. You are not entitled to such resource-intensive queries. How much does COUNT() on a full table scan of billions of rows - with snippets - cost you on BigQuery or a similar pay-for-query-resources service?
    - rufus_foreman 4y ago
lossolo 4y ago
> of about 1,210,000,000 results I always read this as: "When we were crawling all the internet this phrase you are looking for was found in around 1.2 billion pages"
- kyleee 4y ago
  why can't i then spend the next year of my life paging through them?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- tomrod 4y ago
  And being a search engine that provides links relevant to said phrase, reporting what they found is their anticipated deliverable.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  I don't think that's the correct interpretation though, because it states they are the results of your search that are being returned to you, not the content of the wider internet. And if they just flubbed the language but their intention was that it is an estimate of the internet or their index that they never intended to provide you with, the last page wouldn't change to "Page 23 of about 221 results".
antonvs 4y ago
> It’s a signal that your search is generic. Talk about bad user interface design. Why are you trying to defend this silly practice?

riversflow 4y ago

This is absolutely trash and essentially false advertising. Saying there are 1M+ results but then only having 400 viewable is straight up misrepresenting your product. > That’s hundreds of results and usually enough for deep research needs. You can enter a related query to refine your search and learn more. is both patronizing and offensive. 400 result is 4 pages of 100 hits, the way literally anyone who does research on google is going to use it(I haven't used a 10 hit Google page in well over a decade). Not only that, I can browse through 4 pages in like 5 minutes, really really inadequate for "deep research needs", and really anything beyond cursory convenience linking. I've completely dismissed Google Search for in depth topics as a result because of the multiple occasions I tried in vain to find a page I'd visited previously with Google (that I ended up finding again with browser history) that just couldn't be found, even going back and trying to make a search that works. > and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those. this is totally fair but 400 is just way way too few, if you bumped it up to 4k that would be a step in the right direction. Additionally, by my thinking, Google is missing out on the people who are willing to wade through thousands of search results to find quality content, as it stands now those pages have very little way to break into the top 400, but a complex search term followed by a user wading deep into the results to find a specific page where they go and don't return would seem to show any extremely strong signal that that specific page should probably be ranked somewhat higher.

IshKebab 4y ago
This is a very bizarre comment. They aren't saying there are 1M+ results that you can access. Who would even want to do that? The number is to give you an idea of how narrow your search was. This reminds me of when I and a couple of other people watched someone look through 10 whole pages of Google results. Totally insane. But it got even crazier - he actually found the thing he was looking for on the 10th page! Doubly unbelievable.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  I regularly look through 10+ pages of results in Google scholar and Google books. (Google web search has gotten much worse so I don't much use it anymore, but I used to look 10+ pages into Google web searches a decade ago.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tigershark 4y ago

Ah ok, so this is why after a certain amount of clicks of the mouse I am at the end of the Internet. I still remember the time when Internet was much bigger than 40 clicks. Hopefully someone will disrupt you soon and give us back the real Internet.

svachalek 4y ago
Although they still massively dominate the market, the competition is out there. While it wasn't that long ago where nobody else's search results were anywhere near as good, my experience lately is the opposite -- it's hard to do worse than Google results.
- kyleee 4y ago
  yep, and here's to hoping that trend continues and google search dies out

onion2k 4y ago

If you're saying 2 billion when you know there are 'millions' your estimates are off by a factor of 2000. If you can really only show 400 results then the estimate is off by a factor of several million. Maybe that's just how Google Search works, but the story points on your JIRA tickets must be a sight to see. :)

_yb2s 4y ago

It's dishonest to show an estimate that is orders of magnitude off, and not even mention this with something like a +/- standard deviation. I can't imagine how something that has only hundreds of real hits could have an estimate of hundreds of thousands. Why not just drop this estimate altogether?

Waterluvian 4y ago

Do you mind clarifying why they’re off by a bajillion percent? Ie. If this isn’t maliciousness or incompetence, what is it?

dataflow 4y ago
I have no idea what's going on in the algorithm but it's not hard to imagine extrapolation of this sort: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
tomrod 4y ago
Not the OP. My speculation is they justify it internally as defense against scrapers. What can you do? Dunno
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Oh that’s a clever thought. I didn’t consider that angle.
utopcell 4y ago
> If this isn’t maliciousness or incompetence, what is it? Expensive to calculate, for something nobody really cares about anymore.

verisimi 4y ago

The message is that you cannot verify what you are told, you just get what you're given. And what part you are given is an illusion that there are more results. Just trust Google.... what could go wrong? Let's not forget, that Eric Schmidt said that more than 1 result is a bug. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 This touches on the scope and hubris of Google and other companies that mediate reality for us. They think they have 'the truth', they know it and will give it to us, and if we refuse their truth, they will attempt to train us until we get it, in schools, the workplace, online, etc. It's also why they will become irrelevant. If there is nothing organic about their results because the algo filters thoughtcrime ideas out, people will continue to move away. Thank god. I personally use presearch and feel happier that the results are more natural. But nothing is perfect.

DocTomoe 4y ago

How inaccurate does an estimation have to be before it becomes a lie? What happens when a bank teller asks me during a credit application how many assets I have and I estimate about 10 billion bucks, when it later turns out I own the three dollars in my wallet and a strip of chewing gum? Am I (criminally) liable in that case?

tehbeard 4y ago

Not so much ballpark estimates as grains of protons in the multiverse then...

IncRnd 4y ago

Spending 5 minutes performing google searches shows that isn't even close to the truth. The number displayed at the top of the screen is fabricated. Searching for [google] states about 25 billion results, but it can only show me two pages of search results. Searching for [meaning of life] states about 10 billion results, but it can only show me 212 results. Searching for [meaning of life life] states about 7 billions results, but it can only show me 184 results. It is impossible that these results are correct. They are clearly filtered, and the count of results is inflated for every single search. Clicking on the text you recommended to expand all search results doesn't do that. It still limits the results, just to 300-400 instead of 200. In no case I tested could I get to more than 20 pages of results.

rossjudson 4y ago
I feel like you spend a lot of time getting angry at inanimate objects.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  You're projecting your beliefs without cause onto a person over the Internet. I do not feel any anger whatsoever and do not care about Google or how they perform searches.

omgomgomgomg 4y ago

Well,but a consistent estimate of millions of results and then showing 400 is a rather bad estimate. If the search results would be as bad as the estimates, you would have no business. It seems like the high numbers are displayed to mislead about the speed and efficiency of the search, google knows no human will go through 10 thousands of result pages. And ads are only sold for page 1.

jasfi 4y ago

My guess is that this is to prevent bots abusing infinite results pages. Possibly those that would scrape ranked results for a query.