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Comment by Estragon | Hacker News Reader

The methodology offered in the comments, of googling for http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&biw=1366&bih=653&#... and taking the number of results returned for the number of users, seems more direct. Currently that returns about 6.5 million users, which is in the same ballpark.

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I see about 2.8 million results from that query, but I'm not surprised the number changes a lot. The result counts are a very rough approximation calculated on the fly, and shouldn't be relied on for more than order-of-magnitude estimates.

The last name method is precise, but of questionable accuracy; the result count is probably more accurate, but very imprecise. Take your pick :).

That's interesting; if I anonymize by searching through Google Sharing, I also get 2.8 million results. Searching from my own IP address (though without being logged in) still gives 6.5 million.

I think that they are reorganizing the results based on if you are signed in with an account that has plus or not. There was someone who posted that their Google+ was "already" in the top 10 results and twitter wasn't even shown, but it was only true if you were logged in.

Hopefully they aren't doing something too drastic; there's allegedly already an ongoing antitrust investigation about how google orders its search results.

Maybe, but it's worth noting that I wasn't signed in, and don't have a G+ account, yet.

This returned about 6.5 million for me too. The strange, interesting tidbit I noted was that the user #s by no means conformed to Benford's law: I clicked through 5 pages of search results, and all of the user #s began with 11 or 10.

that's wrong, two of the first results are posts by Tom Anderson and Dave Besbris.

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