For example, you can type in something like "purpose of life" and it will say it has 2 billion results, yet if you try to go to result 500, you can't, it will stop at 400, then change the number to 400 results only on the last page.
This happens for every query. Google lies about the astronomical number of search results, then only shows a few hundred at most.
And I'd bet the reason why it's still there (I left Search in 2014) is because < 0.1% of users ever hit the next page. Everybody else just refines their query to a different search. It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for. As a result, Google expends approximately zero engineering effort on pages 2-20 of the results - I know that in the 4 visual redesigns I worked on, we didn't touch them once. It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users.
The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination. Ranking across the full result set is a very complex calculation, and it can depend on some factors that are basically random (eg. timeouts and failures in backend servers). It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different. This requires that the full result set be cached. You can cache 400-1000 results for each of the queries that the 0.1% of users who actually hit "Next" care about, but you'd have a big issue caching 2 billion results for each of those queries.
This is false for other search terms. Search for "meaning of life". At the top left of the first result page it says "About 10,620,000,000 results (0.56 seconds)".
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/SQq7Snl
Logged into Google, Safari 15.6.1.
edit:
Here's a good one:
"starfish buttercup pickle mouse"
Page 1 of 2 says
> About 589,000 results (0.62 seconds)
Page 2 of 2 says
> Page 2 of about 22 results (0.36 seconds)
Oops! Must have been one of those common "multiply by 26,772" errors.
At the bottom of the page, it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed." with an option to show all results.
With all results shown, the total result count goes to 59, so only off by 9,983x! But who's counting? Definitely not Google.
What do you prefer for search if not?
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.
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.
If the number was in the thousands in the late-90s, you could probably get through all of the sites.
If the caching was put in later, say, the early 2000s when google started getting really big, the number might just keep growing until it eventually looks ridiculous.
I've never worked at google, but I've seen a few systems that broke in weirder ways when nobody bothered to maintain them after they had outlived their usefulness.
Both typed into the "url bar", and not search box on goolge.com. The only difference as far as I can tell is I copy/pasted purpose of life, and typed out meaning of life... macos & chrome.
What I get for: "starfish buttercup pickle mouse"
is exactly one result [About 1 results (0.32 seconds)], which is your YC post.
Removing the quotes gives me [About 34 results (0.63 seconds)].
The difference is that I have setup Google to show 100 results per page by default. I believe that this allows the (very approximate) results estimation algorithm to be more accurate. When I switch to 10 results, I get [About 591,000 results (0.53 seconds)]. Feel free to verify that this is the case for you as well.
There is no foul play here. I work at search serving, I've seen that algorithm. My personal opinion is that nobody cared to improve it because almost nobody (modulo YC crowd) cares.
In other words, the product is shitty because no-one at the company really cares about it - because of course, that “product” is just a vehicle for a big ad company. On top of that, there’s no meaningful competition. Hopefully we’ll get some DoJ action on this at some point.
I'd highly recommend this exercise for everyone who complains that there's no competition for Google, because a.) you're actually trying the competition and b.) you might realize how much Google does for you, and how far ahead they are against the competition. Who knows, you might even find a better search engine, and then next time you can come make recommendations for other HNers.
Most daily usage now I use Bing for the rewards points, and it’s approximately as good as current Google. Never have I failed to find something with Bing I then found with Google, despite it being a regular occurrence.
Yes, if only one page is shown, it’s accurate. I picked that (unquoted, sorry) phrase because it resulted in two results pages for me, showing a worse case scenario. With your settings, it would require a term with > 100 results to see the fiction.
I actually do assume it’s intentional, because
1. It’s predominant, at the top left of the page
2. I assume your UI team is competent and cares about every pixel shown on the screen, especially predominantly placed ones
3. it’s great marketing
4. It’s absurdly incorrect. 10x could be ubderstandable. It’s off by nearly 27,000x error here.
I can guarantee you that it's not intentional. It was definitely easier to estimate in the past, when a single query was fired on a single corpus for a given user input, but modern web search is vastly more complicated than this.
Such a shame for basically one-trick pony who doesnt understand that staying relevant long term means that trick must be and remain a damn good proposition.
Its true I eventually give up and do ie duckduckgo and if that fails I try to refine searches even more (but this rarely works since I already start with it as default)
It's very ironic that a search engine, which is supposed to be helpful precisely for the things that are hard to find, seems to actively sabotage your efforts at such deep searching.
I have so many complaints about your product, it drives me wild.
How many people even look at organic results versus the paid-for ads that display at top?
It should be illegal for anyone to be able to purchase ads for another company's trademark. Apple, Google, and Amazon are all extorting companies by forcing them to buy ads to protect their own brand. (My own brand is being attacked by a competitor in this way, and it's ridiculous!)
The only reason anyone uses these systems at scale is that third parties were available in aggregate early on to provide content. You built your product off of our backs. And now that the power dynamic has shifted, we're cattle to soak for as much revenue as possible.
It also seems like the only reason Google is dominant is bad behavior. Paying for default search engine status. Being the default in all of their other unrelated platforms. Achieving browser monopoly.
I've recently started seeing Chrome ads and billboards everywhere. Google purchased a huge percentage of my city's billboard ad inventory for their "better on Chrome" campaign. It's as if Google knows this is the reason for everything. Where except for Apple devices is Chrome not dominant?
This whole cartel needs a muzzle.
Device companies should not be ad companies.
Ad companies should not be service companies.
Service companies should not be content and production companies, since they can favor their own and price pressure the rest.
We have a world where the top tech conglomerates are all of these and then some. They've cast a wide net and turned the whole world of consumer interaction into a supermarket, where we now have to pay for "shelf space" to interact with customers, pay to protect our brands from unfair sniping, pay to grow, obey asinine rules to build a product that fits their desired shape, integrate with their payments and login stack (so we're even less in a relationship with our customers).
It's a far cry from the open web of the 90's. Really bad for small companies, new startups, and even consumers. We can barely afford to build our products with all the margin that goes to Google, Apple, and the rest.
I wish the rank and file could feel this. :(
'Don't mind us destroying society, we are just following incentives!'
Swear I've heard that somewhere before though...
The way Apple and Google have wedged themselves in as an interface and then gatekeeper to our customers is deeply pernicious. I respect what they have achieved but it’s deeply saddening to wonder if the freedom we had decades ago online was anomalous and not intrinsic to the medium.
Unlike today, right? Where actual search results... represent less than 10% of the page and the rest is irrelevant information and ads in Google search https://grumpy.website/post/0XCmMC-2O
In my opinion a search engine that can guess and understand my question from a single word is superior to encyclopaedic-bureaucratic return. (After all, in whole lot of times I am searching for something that I don't even understand what am I really looking for.)
> It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different.
A bit off topic: I have always wondered why search result is the only feed on the web (apart from HN) that has not adopted infinite scrolling. This is a good explanation.
You are confusing users with queries. A lot more than 0.1% of users use the other result pages - double digit percent certainly. But if Google is doing a good job they don’t do it very often.
"Page 14 of about 184,000,000 results (0.83 seconds)" "Page 15 of about 149 results (0.76 seconds)"
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 149 already displayed."
Maybe it's time Google spent a bit more time on their search engine, including pages 2-20.
Extreme profiling Google? :-)
Search engines are still bad.
Having to go through 10 pages of results to find something that matches what I was looking for is one of the reasons I stopped using Google. What I want is almost never on the first few pages of search results.
and yeah there is probably billions of mentions of any single word out there if you count the computer generated content
That doesn't sound like an estimate to me. To me, that is intentional misleading.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Waiter: What will you have this evening?
Guest: Everything looks good
Ok, everything, coming right up.
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?
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!
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... "Trump signs repeal of U.S. broadband privacy rules" (2017) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-trump/trump-... )
You choose whether to shop at Google.
Google buying the default search engine position in browsers does not prevent users from changing the - possibly OpenSearch - browser search engine to DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.
You can force an address bar entry to a.tld/search=?${query} search w/:
Ctrl-L
?${query}
?how to change the default search engine
?how to block ads & trackers in {browser name}
?how to provide free search queries on a free search engine and have positive revenue after years of debt obligations to fairly build market share
Why would they now get out of paying for Firefox development using a revenue model, too?
(Competitors can and do use e.g. google/bazel the open source clone of google/blaze, which is what Chromium builds were built with before gn. Here's Chromium/BUILD.bazel, for example: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/v8/v8.git/+/master:BUIL... )
Android (and /e/ and LineageOS) do allow you to install browsers other than the Chrome WebView and Chrome. Is it possible to install anything other than Safari (WebKit) on iOS devices? Maybe from another software repository like F-droid? Hopefully current downstream releases with signed manifests and SafetyNet scanning uploaded apps
Literally on absolutely every google search page: https://policies.google.com/terms
No one read terms and conditions, yes?
Statute of Frauds applies to agreements regarding amounts over $500. Is this a conscionable agreement between which identified parties? Does what satisfy chain of custody requirements for criminal or civil admissability if the data is from not a trustless system but a centralized trustful system?
"Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin Protects Scraping of Public Data" (2019) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
And then the interplay between a "Right to be Forgotten" and the community legal obligation to retain for lawful investigative law enforcement purposes. They don't know what they want: easy investigations, compromisable investigations, privacy
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/trackin...>
But contrary to your assertion, estimates of total results even if not directly viewable through Google SERPs are* of potential value.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
It's the internet. The internet is huge. I can imagine there being millions of pages that mention cows in some manner. I know google indexes the internet, therefore I would expect that if it tells me millions that there are actually millions _THAT IT CAN SHOW ME_.
When it tells me 10 million and only shows me 8 million, I'll be forgiving. Maybe exasperated, but forgiving. When it tells me 10 million and can only show 400, that exasperation quickly turns into distrust.
final short maxReferencesWeAreGoingToDisplay = 400;
final short numDisplayedReferences = Math.min(totalReferencesWeFind, maxReferencesWeAreGoingToDisplay);
I'll send you a bill for my consulting services.
I estimate my consulting charges at about 10 cents an hour. There's a help page somewhere that tells how many orders of magnitude that estimate might be off by.
mis·lead·ing | ˌmisˈlēdiNG | adjective giving the wrong idea or impression: your article contains a number of misleading statements.
This doesn't sound like a good defense for the product's behavior.
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.
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 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"
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".
Talk about bad user interface design.
Why are you trying to defend this silly practice?
> 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.
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.
What I've learned about edge cases: I'm not nearly creative enough to think of them all.
Do you think Google Search is a product or a service to searchers?
- If a product: it should advertise precisely what it supports.
- If a service: it should strive for accuracy.
What is is today: a hook for advertising, most of which is noise.
Searching effectively has become difficult, and few search ads have context (I don't look at ad links for purchasing). I'm probably not the median user, either, but perhaps I belong to a useful subpopulation.
Hopefully someone will disrupt you soon and give us back the real Internet.
Maybe that's just how Google Search works, but the story points on your JIRA tickets must be a sight to see. :)
What can you do? Dunno
Expensive to calculate, for something nobody really cares about anymore.
Let's not forget, that Eric Schmidt said that more than 1 result is a bug.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I joined Google in Nov. 2005, and "The Life of a Query" was one of the classes that everyone took. Even then, we were told that figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Maybe now it's 400, I don't know.
What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug.
If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.
> If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.
It's a filtered mess.
Search for test and then search for test test in two different tabs. Once the results appear, switch between those tabs. The estimates of results radically differ from each other, and the results are not shared between those two tabs. The tabs should return mostly identical results due to the keywords, but they are not even close to each other.
If you look at the types of results shown between those two tabs, the issues with search results being filtered will be immediately shown. One tab will show 98% of the results filtered to show COVID-19 information with a little bit of results for sites that charge people to train for standardized tests. However, the other tab shows vastly different results about network speed tests, test.com, the word test at wikipedia, the definition of the word test, the etymology of the word test, etc.
Wrong. I tried "the meaning of life" on Google just now. It said:
About 9,890,000,000 results (0.66 seconds)
Where is the claim that you will be able to scroll through 9,890,000,000 results?
There is plenty to complain about with Google, and the rest of this thread shows you some of it. It will be a lot more productive for you to focus on some of that.
For "purpose of life" it changes from "Page 22 of about 12,270,000,000 results" to "Page 23 of about 226 results".
It's not a million miles from hotel and flights websites saying "37 people are looking at this page right now!" It's a dark pattern to increase engagement. A pretty innocuous one in Google's case, but it is a little deceptive.
I was an avid user of altavista, hotbot, yahoo, and early google. I recall that I was always able to 'page' through an absurd number of results. But I am old and have a bad memory, maybe I'm wrong
Sounds like they're using biased estimators for the number of search results. If the estimates weren't biased, the underestimated numbers would balance out the overestimated ones, so for every query where they fall short by 2 billion there would be one that has two billion more hits than shown by the UI (or two billion with one hit more).
> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?
If it's true that they show biased estimates, I'd say that's a pretty adequate description.
[0] https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-googl...
No, I'd expect that it would be able to generate subsequent pages on the fly.
Idk what technoligies google uses, but generally its kind of hard to skip directly to the i'th result of a full text index efficiently.
If Google would say "1 of over 1000 results" and cut off at page 10 of 100 results with a nice message saying "please refine your search query if you haven't found what you're looking for," nobody here would be complaining.
This is something that just doesn't matter.
I appreciate that everyone has different life experiences that lead to different expectations, but for me personally it would go without saying that google would not let you view all results to a query that returns million of results.
(I mean, damn, if every page shows 10 results, there would be 400 clicks in the same page + 4000 lines of results. You would need another search engine to sift through such amount of results in any sane amount of time...)
How does it serve the user? If it doesn't, what is the purpose?
Yes.
Is the theoretical amount of results the important part? Or the results itself?
Let's imagine you go to your imaginary mentor to ask a question. Your mentor can give you thousands of answers - they are a creative person - would you really even care about all those answers, or do you want only one or few (more) accurate?
But fair point, if I were an immortal person with infinite amount of time I too would want to see ALL the results, not only the "best".
Would you use an SQL database that doesn't return a proper result set to your query or take LIMIT and OFFSET into account?
(But I may be strange here, dunno. I am alright with using suboptimal tools - like WordPress for my eshop, haha...)
Everything I've heard and seen (thanks to remote work I can work alongside them now) has shown me that Google's culture is fundamentally based on Googler egos. Their weirdness about org charts and levels really exemplifies it (org chart and level are obscured from you - contrast this with Amazon, for instance).
But how can you pay a bunch of 20 something’s 200K+ and have them around other equally entitled people and not expect some amount of smugness.
No, I consider it accurate.
I still consider Google to be marginally useful these days, but the quality has slipped and the UX has yet to keep pace.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
Yes, that is what people expect when someone says "I found a billion hits on what you're looking for, here is the pile." How does this being wholly inaccurate by orders of magnitude to what the user can retrieve benefit the user?
Uninteresting semantics intended to be clever from both of us aside, you also missed that, although it is a little lie repeated many times, the datapoint still offers no benefit to the user.
No, it’s 100% accurate. Your response is delusional and a poor attempt at manipulation.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
If it isn’t possible for users to see those results then you should only display the number of results that can be accessed. That would be “not lying” in this case.
They should make it clear to the user how many results are available to them.
They have literally one job.
Does this literally mean not literally?
> the expectation of being able to see all the results.
Which would not exist if Google weren't pushing this massive mystery number that we're currently, in this thread, only speculating about what it could be referring to. This expectation could be easily solved by showing the number of results that Google is planning to return to the user, and tossing out the number that means nothing to anyone.
The slight twist is that you can see all of the results. Just not by paging. You can refine your query to see them all.
I'm sure the number is just an estimation, but it does have some value.
1. Google has to return a result count.
2. It can't/won't be accurate.
3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to large.
The jump from 2 to 3 is dodgy and I see people questioning it. But I don't see anybody challenging point 1. Why does google have to give a number at all? If google can't/won't give an accurate result count, then they should give a result count at all. I don't care what technical limitations might complicate giving an accurate result count, that's no excuse for lying when silence is a perfectly valid choice.
Obviously they provide the count for marketing reasons. That's an explanation for the lying, but not an excuse.
>3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to (sic) large.
LOL, what? No way!
Interestingly, I just did a search for "Google" and when I got to the page 36, the top changed to "Page 36 of 360 results" from "Page 35 of about 25,270,000,000 results".
They must be porting it forward to new versions of their results page, right? The results page has changed a lot over the years. It might be a dusty forgotten decision to have it, but it can't be dusty forgotten code.
Ya know, that whole thing indexes are for by definition.
Oh, but if they did that they wouldn't have a convenient way to implement dropping something from public view either, so there's that.
Except that's _not_ what Google is saying. Google is saying there are 1 million results and won't tell you that you can only access the first N.
The implied promise is the button that says "Search".
1. It's a search engine. Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.
2. Searching with other tools works. Use `grep` or your computer's local search feature and it will give you all of the results.
3. If I go through my old email, I can download literally every email. I can search literally every email, for hundreds of thousands of email.
True. But that's not the question, is it? The question is whether only giving you the "first" N of the results makes it useless, or something else...
Nobody, I think, is contesting, that search in some contexts is always expected to provide you with access to everything that is found. The issue is whether that can be expected to apply to a case where 10M results are found, and if not, what the cutoff point ought to be ...
> > The implied promise is the button that says "Search".
> True. But that's not the question, is it?
You wanna stop moving the goalposts?
> Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.
but nobody has suggested that Google doesn't provide any results.
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.
Update: Wow, zero results for "2585ecdb9a753ca54a96fae62bfda433", the MD5 hash of "r68". They must be filtering them out on purpose.
Update 2: Googling "2585ecdb9a753ca54a96fae62bfda433" now turns up this exact 10 minute old comment, so your approach might work if the hash is embedded within "real" content.
There are 429,000,000 pages that are related to my search? There are 4.29x10^8 pages that have, what, one or more of those words on them?
Seems more like a lie than like the truth.
Maybe they leave that in the results so people will focus on trivia, instead of antitrust and other issues that actually matter. "Look! Over there! They're claiming there are 9 billion answers and you can't see them all."
Clever.
Home depot has roughly 36000 items stocked in a store. Try using that number for _jal's argument.
"Can I keep going?"
"No. You need to be more specific, no browsing more than a few dozen models at a time."
Searching for [product 1234] has "about" 157 million results -> narrow the search -> [product 1234 bookshelf] has about 3.4 million results.
Searching for [product 1234defg] has "about" 280 results -> widen the search -> [product 1234 defg] has about 54000 results.
If you just show a number that's around 400 for essentially every query, you don't have any feedback on whether to widen or narrow the search if you don't see the result in the first couple of pages.
Just one of many reasons why my default search engine is DDG now. DDG kind of sucks but these days it sucks less than Google.
Search for "couple having sex" then set the filter to "past month". Zero results on bing and ddg. It started around late January, early February. Other things that would lead to porn also fail like "woman f*cking dildo", "shemale", that's all I tried. They'll show result, but if you filter for 24hrs, past week, past month, they're blank
GitHub does this too, if you click on the Issues page and change the search query it searches all of github, not just your own repos. But you can't go to the last page of the results (not sure about the max page number, but there is a limit and for good reasons).
About 13,460,000,000 results (1.35 seconds)
..
Page 2 of about 163 results (1.15 seconds)
>"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."<
..
About 12,620,000,000 results (1.26 seconds)
..
Page 4 of about 361 results (1.75 seconds)Somewhere a product manager is beaming with pride
Check these videos out.
TruthStream's production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyJB45ewvU
Jimmy from BrightInsight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI
Do you get insulted over the fact that food producers have been decreasing the size of their food servings while keeping the same price? For example, a “pint” of ice cream is no longer a pint, it’s 14 oz. And the size of OJ had been decreasing Constantly but the price stays the same.
Here you are actually suffering a loss. You are being deceived into believing you are getting the same but you’re not. Are you upset and insulted about this?
With Google all you’re not getting are the results you wouldn’t have used anyway. You don’t actually suffer a loss. And yet, this is what you’re insulted over?
I've seen this around a lot, but I have yet to see proof that it's a "lie" in any way. Perhaps provide some evidence if you have it?
More likely, there ARE 2 million results, but they're not going to show them all to you, because you are not economically able to pay them enough to do so. Now, if you want to pay Google a billion dollars, you can probably get all 2 million search results. They'll probably deliver them on gold-plated floppy disks if you want.
Anyway it ALSO it serves as an important hint that there are LOTS of results, and you should NARROW down your search. Wouldn't it be weirder if you searched for "meaning of life" and it said "200 results"?
<query> | head -n 500(This exaggeration is about 1 million times less severe than Google's.)
Never noticed this !