4 ms·
Must've been brought back after I left, I have no idea what the rationale was.
by nostrademons 4y ago
Must've been brought back after I left, I have no idea what the rationale was.
- citizenpaul 4y agoDoes that mean you don't use google search? Its been back a long time. What do you prefer for search if not?
- frozencell 4y agoGoogle employees don't know what's going about top-level policies unlike a few government affiliated managers like Dean or Page (source: google images). It's possible that Google employees don't see the same content as outsiders. Literally CCP vibes, or Plato's Cavern.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoWhat do you mean by "source: google images"?
- utopcell 4y agoEvery Google engineer can see the code that performs this calculation. Google engineers have demonstrated that we are very vocal when we smell foul play.
- frozencell 4y agoThe government doesn't have backdoors in Google source codes? or Google engineers are patriotic?
- throwaway894345 4y agoI’ve used Google for decades and I’ve never paid any attention to this. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was there or not without looking.
- saghm 4y agoI think a better question is why it was ever there in the first place if the numbers are so extraordinarily inaccurate.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoYou really think a company would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
- Kamq 4y agoBased on the explanation above, it sounds like the big number is the "real number" and then they throw away everything except the first couple results when they're put in the cache. Presumably the number of results is calculated before this caching and nobody cares enough to fix it.
- cyanydeez 4y agoYeah, so basically you just can't actually get millions of results. But others have pointed out that those index numbers don't resolve rationally to results. It seems the index number is a different match than what they choose to show.
- saghm 4y agoSure, I understand where the number comes from, but I have trouble understanding why someone would program that calculation, see that the number is not actually what a user would experience, and say "okay cool let's put that on the page". It seems hard to imagine any possible motivation other than being purposely misleading, in which case the answer the question "why was it put back?" presumably would have the same answer.
- nostrademons 4y agoIf the number is in the billions you're not going to experience each of those websites anyway - you'd run out of time in your lifetime. I suspect (it was introduced before I started, and re-introduced after I left) that it's there to remind users of the work that software performs on their behalf, much like how TurboTax says "$X in taxes saved" or Brave says "9 hours saved blocking ads" or your brokerage says "Total profit: $X". Users tend to forget this, and just assume that they're entitled to the world where the product exists.