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?
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.
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.
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.
(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?
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.
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.
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.
This is something that just doesn't matter.
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
[0] https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-googl...
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.
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.
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.
For "purpose of life" it changes from "Page 22 of about 12,270,000,000 results" to "Page 23 of about 226 results".