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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

You got a lot of responses telling you why Google can't or doesn't want to provide an accurate result count. I guess the logic is:

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.

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The number of pages in a search index and the number of results found were major selling points for search engines. I'd say that the count got carried forward in the last 20 years.

As I said, it's for marketing. That's the explanation, but it's not an excuse. They should remove it, nobody is forcing them to keep it. They choose to keep it even though they know it's insanely inaccurate.

Yeah I agree it is an explanation. My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypothesis isn't justification for keeping around either.

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".

> My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypothesis

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.

Yup. My 'nobody wanted to touch it in the last 2 decades' hypotheses was more referring to how the feature might have made sense in the earlier days when Google respects all the keywords in our search queries. As Google evolved, it became impossible to drill into those results, but there's no upside for any product manager to change/remove it.

They could say "cutting off approximately 10B results after 400 hits.".

If it's an estimate it's not a lie

It's not a good faith estimate. They know their queries never return a million results, let alone hundreds of billions. Asserting that it's an estimate is insulting.

If there is an estimation which underestimates the count of results, then it can be not a lie. Personally, I’ve not seen one in the past 22+ years. Do you have different experience?

> 2. It can't/won't be accurate.

>3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to (sic) large.

LOL, what? No way!

When I say the leap from 2 to 3 is dodgy, I meant that as a bit of dry understatement. It's insane. But to even get to point 2 you need to first assume point 1, which is that Google is somehow compelled to provide a result count. They aren't. They could simply remove the result count and not say anything about it, then they wouldn't ""need"" to lie about it.

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