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."
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.
Waiter: What will you have this evening?
Guest: Everything looks good
Ok, everything, coming right up.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?