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Imagine 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 sea

Imagine 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 ago
Actually, 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.