Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

> Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page.

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.

View on HN

I don't doubt that's what you see.

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.

> 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.

By all means, feel free to use any other search engine that you feel is better than Google. Or better yet, wow us with the better engine that you can build.

It’s almost as if you didn’t even make it to the second sentence of my comment. Maybe take another stab at it? You’re really going to enjoy the third sentence.

FWIW my default browser is Brave, and Brave's default search engine is Brave Search. I almost switched back to Safari because the Brave Search results were so much worse than Google. Eventually found that you can set the default search engine in Brave - there's Brave, Google, DDG, Qwant, Bing, StartPage, and Ecosia available.

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.

A lesser man wouldn’t snark so hard while pointing people to an obviously absurd claim (no competition for Google search). Clearly we are in the presence of greatness!

Google used to be much better. If I could use the old Google, I would. I really do want content beyond the top 500 websites, and sometimes it was on page two. Now it’s not there at all.

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.

Wow, I had strong suspicions Google was dicks (because of too much anti-user BS in their products) but here is proof!

> Feel free to verify this is the case for you.

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.

It was a good query, I'd have done something similar to replicate.

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.

I shit you not, I searched purpose of life, got no counter. Searched meaning of life, got a counter: https://imgur.com/a/SfzILul

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.

Same here, and when I hit page 20 it changed to "Page 20 of about 198 results (1.22 seconds)"

Similar for me.. 8-10 billion results, then on page 21, "Page 21 of about 205 results" and no more pages after 21.

But if I click the link to repeat the query without truncating the results do continue beyond page 21.

Must've been brought back after I left, I have no idea what the rationale was.

Does that mean you don't use google search? Its been back a long time.

What do you prefer for search if not?

Google employees don't know what's going about top-level policies unlike a few government affiliated managers like Dean or Page (source: google images). It's possible that Google employees don't see the same content as outsiders. Literally CCP vibes, or Plato's Cavern.

What do you mean by "source: google images"?

Every Google engineer can see the code that performs this calculation. Google engineers have demonstrated that we are very vocal when we smell foul play.

The government doesn't have backdoors in Google source codes? or Google engineers are patriotic?

I’ve used Google for decades and I’ve never paid any attention to this. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was there or not without looking.

I think a better question is why it was ever there in the first place if the numbers are so extraordinarily inaccurate.

You really think a company would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

Based on the explanation above, it sounds like the big number is the "real number" and then they throw away everything except the first couple results when they're put in the cache. Presumably the number of results is calculated before this caching and nobody cares enough to fix it.

Yeah, so basically you just can't actually get millions of results.

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.

Sure, I understand where the number comes from, but I have trouble understanding why someone would program that calculation, see that the number is not actually what a user would experience, and say "okay cool let's put that on the page". It seems hard to imagine any possible motivation other than being purposely misleading, in which case the answer the question "why was it put back?" presumably would have the same answer.

If the number is in the billions you're not going to experience each of those websites anyway - you'd run out of time in your lifetime.

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.

That presumably depends on when the caching was put in place.

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.

Well how do you know there aren’t 10 billion results

Reply on news.ycombinator.com