4 ms·

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
    >> you, the user using free services for free Absolutely false, it is not free. I have provided them with my data which they will monetize. It's the same as Hacker News not being free. I have provided Hacker News with my personal data. For example, if you look through my post history just in the last day or so, you would know that Rufus Foreman owns a killer cis-gendered cat named Mr. Tiddlesworth, that Rufus Foreman is a Warren Buffett fan boy, and that when thinking of a generic search term to use as an example, the first thing to come to Rufus Foreman's mind is "cows". Now imagine what sort of dark patterns an unscrupulous corporation like say, Hooli, could implement in order to target me with advertising tailored to my preferences!
    - westurner 4y ago
      If you tell the bartender your life story, they don't owe you free drinks (and they might as well sell a screenplay) While it's true that they sell the data they collect, you can choose to not share such data and still receive the free services. "Bromite" is a fork of Chromium, for example. If you spend time in their store and cause loss and order a bunch of free waters, do the Terms of Service even apply to you? What can they even do? What can LinkedIn do about scraping and resale of every public profile page? Give me some free privacy on my free dsl line. (Note that ISPs can sell the entirety of a customer's internet PCAPs, for example, due to Pai's FCC rescinding a Wheeler FCC privacy rule https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill-vote-trump-marsha-blackburn-internet-browsing-history https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill... "Trump signs repeal of U.S. broadband privacy rules" (2017) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-trump/trump-signs-repeal-of-u-s-broadband-privacy-rules-idUSKBN1752PR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-trump/trump-... )
      - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
        Bromite is not a Google service. It's a false precedence that anything open source from a corporation is a free service and makes their anti-privacy stance good. That's like saying a criminal is a good guy because he did 50 hours of charity work after murdering 2 people.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  The information can be useful. Some years back I hit on a notion of how to rate websites, domains, and even TLDs based on the prevalence of specific terms within them, as returned by Google search. I came up with a list of 100 search terms in the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list. I added a few searches that should at least proxy for English-language texts using frequently-used but not stopwords (the word "this" was one of those). And arbitrarily chose the string "Kim Kardashian" to represent non-salient content. That gave me a touch over 100 terms, and I identified roughly 100 target sites (sites, domains, TLDs). The method was to run a Google web search on each of these and scrape the reported number of hits. That meant something north of 10,000 Google web searches, which I automated with a creative application of delays (up to several minutes), running over a week or two. Anti-bot tactics deployed by Google make this all but impossible now, though there's a service which (for a price) offers a directly-queriable web index so far as I'm aware, which might make for some interesting further research. I summarized and posted the results here: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...> But contrary to your assertion, estimates of total results even if not directly viewable through Google SERPs are* of potential value.
Miraste 4y ago
It's not, though - when you reach the last page, the listed number of results changes to a few hundred. You can't approximate a three digit number, be off by 7 orders of magnitude, and say it's an "estimate" with any credibility.
- dlp211 4y ago
  Ok, what do you think is more realistic for a term like 'cows', that there are only a few hundred references or that there are millions. I'm not going to say that the UX is designed well end-to-end, but Google doesn't display more than X number of results for a given search string, ever, where X is O(100). It costs way too much money and you are unlikely to find what you are looking for by showing you more than the top X results.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    A few hundred, because that is what is being provided by the service. "I found a billion hits, but I'm only giving you two" is in no way a good defense. It is blaming the user for a completely reasonable interpretation of the language -- weasel words are not appreciated by people.
    - dlp211 4y ago
      You think a for-profit company should invest in a feature/edge case that will never be used in an earnest or useful way? The idea that you would earnestly search through 400 records only to not find what you are looking for --but the 401st record would-- is just not a realistic use-case.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        No, I expect them to list the number of results within an order of magnitude of what is available for the user to review, which would be an accurate and reasonable report for what is provided. And if they want to offer your proposed crazy edge case as a service, folks needing it are willing to pay for organized information that is deep.
dev_tty01 4y ago
Sorry, that's a cop out. It says "About X results" and it shows this on a page of results. The inference is clearly that I could see about X number of results if I'm patient enough.
IncRnd 4y ago
It's misleading, because the pretended estimate is selected in every case as a misleadingly large number that never occurs for any search. mis·lead·ing | ˌmisˈlēdiNG | adjective giving the wrong idea or impression: your article contains a number of misleading statements.
tomrod 4y ago
"Hi, I'm a search service, and I know about a zillion things you just searched for, here are two." This doesn't sound like a good defense for the product's behavior.
chasebank 4y ago
I can't tell if half these comments are from typical developer playing 'I'm technically right / devils advocate' or if google just has a team working on public image.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  So you think there's a theoretical possibility that google doesn't have a team working on public image?
  - effingwewt 4y ago
    They astroturf so hard it's hitting great firewall levels. I'm so over employees coming out to tour their love for their employer. Defending indefensible bullshit like 'our estimate was 27k orders of magnitude off, oops!' Google is the evil bigco they spent years pretending not to be. People past and presently employed there can keep pretending, but most of us are done with the pretenses now. S/G/FB/M$/AMZN/APPL. All the same.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> How is it misleading? It's an estimate of the total results, it doesn't say it's going to display them Ignoring how dumb of a technicality that is, why does that number suddenly shrink to 231 when you hit the last page? Depending on what you're measuring, it's either "1,210,000,000" or "231". It's not both.

"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
  >> you, the user using free services for free Absolutely false, it is not free. I have provided them with my data which they will monetize. It's the same as Hacker News not being free. I have provided Hacker News with my personal data. For example, if you look through my post history just in the last day or so, you would know that Rufus Foreman owns a killer cis-gendered cat named Mr. Tiddlesworth, that Rufus Foreman is a Warren Buffett fan boy, and that when thinking of a generic search term to use as an example, the first thing to come to Rufus Foreman's mind is "cows". Now imagine what sort of dark patterns an unscrupulous corporation like say, Hooli, could implement in order to target me with advertising tailored to my preferences!
  - westurner 4y ago
    If you tell the bartender your life story, they don't owe you free drinks (and they might as well sell a screenplay) While it's true that they sell the data they collect, you can choose to not share such data and still receive the free services. "Bromite" is a fork of Chromium, for example. If you spend time in their store and cause loss and order a bunch of free waters, do the Terms of Service even apply to you? What can they even do? What can LinkedIn do about scraping and resale of every public profile page? Give me some free privacy on my free dsl line. (Note that ISPs can sell the entirety of a customer's internet PCAPs, for example, due to Pai's FCC rescinding a Wheeler FCC privacy rule https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill-vote-trump-marsha-blackburn-internet-browsing-history https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill... "Trump signs repeal of U.S. broadband privacy rules" (2017) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-trump/trump-signs-repeal-of-u-s-broadband-privacy-rules-idUSKBN1752PR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-trump/trump-... )
    - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
      Bromite is not a Google service. It's a false precedence that anything open source from a corporation is a free service and makes their anti-privacy stance good. That's like saying a criminal is a good guy because he did 50 hours of charity work after murdering 2 people.
dredmorbius 4y ago
The information can be useful. Some years back I hit on a notion of how to rate websites, domains, and even TLDs based on the prevalence of specific terms within them, as returned by Google search. I came up with a list of 100 search terms in the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list. I added a few searches that should at least proxy for English-language texts using frequently-used but not stopwords (the word "this" was one of those). And arbitrarily chose the string "Kim Kardashian" to represent non-salient content. That gave me a touch over 100 terms, and I identified roughly 100 target sites (sites, domains, TLDs). The method was to run a Google web search on each of these and scrape the reported number of hits. That meant something north of 10,000 Google web searches, which I automated with a creative application of delays (up to several minutes), running over a week or two. Anti-bot tactics deployed by Google make this all but impossible now, though there's a service which (for a price) offers a directly-queriable web index so far as I'm aware, which might make for some interesting further research. I summarized and posted the results here: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...> But contrary to your assertion, estimates of total results even if not directly viewable through Google SERPs are* of potential value.

Miraste 4y ago

It's not, though - when you reach the last page, the listed number of results changes to a few hundred. You can't approximate a three digit number, be off by 7 orders of magnitude, and say it's an "estimate" with any credibility.

dlp211 4y ago
Ok, what do you think is more realistic for a term like 'cows', that there are only a few hundred references or that there are millions. I'm not going to say that the UX is designed well end-to-end, but Google doesn't display more than X number of results for a given search string, ever, where X is O(100). It costs way too much money and you are unlikely to find what you are looking for by showing you more than the top X results.
- tomrod 4y ago
  A few hundred, because that is what is being provided by the service. "I found a billion hits, but I'm only giving you two" is in no way a good defense. It is blaming the user for a completely reasonable interpretation of the language -- weasel words are not appreciated by people.
  - dlp211 4y ago
    You think a for-profit company should invest in a feature/edge case that will never be used in an earnest or useful way? The idea that you would earnestly search through 400 records only to not find what you are looking for --but the 401st record would-- is just not a realistic use-case.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      No, I expect them to list the number of results within an order of magnitude of what is available for the user to review, which would be an accurate and reasonable report for what is provided. And if they want to offer your proposed crazy edge case as a service, folks needing it are willing to pay for organized information that is deep.

dev_tty01 4y ago

Sorry, that's a cop out. It says "About X results" and it shows this on a page of results. The inference is clearly that I could see about X number of results if I'm patient enough.

IncRnd 4y ago

It's misleading, because the pretended estimate is selected in every case as a misleadingly large number that never occurs for any search. mis·lead·ing | ˌmisˈlēdiNG | adjective giving the wrong idea or impression: your article contains a number of misleading statements.

tomrod 4y ago

"Hi, I'm a search service, and I know about a zillion things you just searched for, here are two." This doesn't sound like a good defense for the product's behavior.

chasebank 4y ago

I can't tell if half these comments are from typical developer playing 'I'm technically right / devils advocate' or if google just has a team working on public image.

rufus_foreman 4y ago
So you think there's a theoretical possibility that google doesn't have a team working on public image?
- effingwewt 4y ago
  They astroturf so hard it's hitting great firewall levels. I'm so over employees coming out to tour their love for their employer. Defending indefensible bullshit like 'our estimate was 27k orders of magnitude off, oops!' Google is the evil bigco they spent years pretending not to be. People past and presently employed there can keep pretending, but most of us are done with the pretenses now. S/G/FB/M$/AMZN/APPL. All the same.

Dylan16807 4y ago

> How is it misleading? It's an estimate of the total results, it doesn't say it's going to display them Ignoring how dumb of a technicality that is, why does that number suddenly shrink to 231 when you hit the last page? Depending on what you're measuring, it's either "1,210,000,000" or "231". It's not both.