Google’s “million’s of search results” are not being served
serpapi.com
serpapi.com
The search “Golang” returns 225k+ repositories. Each page of results has 10 repositories. I queried page 1000 to see the 10001st-10010th results and got a 404.
I searched Wikipedia (using its own search page) for “America” and was told there were 1.9M results. I requested the 10001st result and it failed with this message:
“An error has occurred while searching: Could not retrieve results. Up to 10000 search results are supported, but results starting at 10000 were requested.”
There was an HN thread along these lines about web search somewhat recently, with people making confident accusations about false advertising etc.
But it really seems that everyone does this. I don’t know, maybe it’s still wrong or misleading.
But personally I’m ok knowing “there are X hits and we will serve you some of them”.
EDIT: I just searched the Library of Congress for “god” and was told I was viewing results 1-25 of 324,782. Sure enough when I asked for page 10,000 I was rebuffed. I really don’t think this is a Google thing
That said, I do think it hinges on dishonest. Even if well intended, there is absolutely no faith in thinking that there were actually that many meaningful hits on any of these searches. Nor is there really much gained by presenting such large numbers.
I can almost buy that it is intended directionally to help refine search terms. But, the numbers are so silly large that I don't. Especially as there is no way to see the last results to know exactly why they count as hits, but are not worth serving.
Similarly whenever I've looked at the number of results in Google it was to judge how common something is. For example, if I want to know the most commonly used spelling between two options, I Google both and check the number. That's what the number is helpful for, and really the only thing it could be helpful for. It is its own information.
[1] I know the question might need to be revised for the number to reflect the answer accurately; you get the idea.
I get that it can be somewhat directional, but I question that anyone is getting meaningful data out of it. :(
> if I want to know the most commonly used spelling between two options
do those mirrors count as "use" of the word? Or does "use" refer only to the original writer?
If a neologism is written once and read by millions, it carries more weight than one read by only a few people. Perhaps the same goes for spelling variants: the more people see it, the more people agree it's the typical spelling. Lots of mirroring could be a decent proxy for lots of readership.
Obviously there aren't millions of meaningful hits on most terms, but you don't need to go to page 10001 for that. You can get to page 3 and know it for sure.
This does call back to the odd false confidence that our industry bakes into the interview process. "Design a realtime chat program that can notify any number of followers that you posted and let them respond with sub millisecond latency."
I do hold the number of results trustworthy (not exact, but a good estimate). Having the index in the Inverted Index format, and efficient joins (solved problem), it's just about getting the size of the term list and summing over the shards. Something that Google anyway has to do for the regular retrieval.
That's reasonable. But as you said, what they're doing now is bordering on dishonest.
You Searched: ALL: God
Your search retrieved more records than can be displayed. Only the first 10,000 will be shown.
Titles List: 1-25 of 10000 https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=God&searchCod...
I found it best to optimize for whatever is a reasonable but useful for users while also preventing any really seriously resource intensive but low value queries (mostly bots / folks trying to mess with your site) to some number that will work with your server main node memory limits.
I navigated to loc.gov and searched directly from the home page.
I was sent to this page: https://www.loc.gov/search/?in=&q=god&new=true&st=
At the top, it says “Results 1-25 of 324,782” and does not mention the limit of 10,000 anywhere.
The number here also seems less misleading because all 324,782 results do seem to exist. It doesn't want to generate a pagination for the entire set, but you could get to them by choosing different formats, date ranges, collections etc. The number Google repors, as far as I can tell, needs to be taken on faith.
But you can subdivide the search results by date and get every item on your original list: https://www.loc.gov/search/?dates=1890/1899&q=god&sp=1808
So, they have and can show you every single one of those 324,782.
Asking for page 10,000 is asking the search engine to search and _rank_ 10,000 * 10 results and give you the last one. That's very expensive and ultimately useless - search is about finding what you're looking for on page 1, not on page 10,000 :)
So it is true that there are 225k+ repositories using Golang (you can compute that with an index scan once a week), but searching them is an entirely different problem.
To not trust that the results on page 1 are better than those on page 34557 is the same as saying that their ranking function does not work at all, which would mean that it's at best as good as random chance. That's clearly not the case, therefore I can trust that page 1 indeed has more relevant results than page 34557.
With that said, Page 34557 doesn't exist. And that's fine. The result count estimate is not based on the actual ranking that has taken place (at least not directly). It would be an absolute waste of resources to rank that many results. If you cannot find what you're looking for on the first page, then it's much easier to reformulate your query. Easier for you because it gives you more control over what you want your search results to be and easier for google because it only needs to rank a couple hundred results instead of a bajillion.
If everyone lies, that doesn't make it right to lie, no matter the technological barrier.
We should't accept and normalize this behavior. If a search claims there are six million results, I should be able to see any or all of those claimed.
If Google (and the others) can't let me see all the results, be honest and tell me. "Google found 6,553,500 results. Showing the 5,000 most relevant."
Google advertises that it has x results, but there is no way to know if that is true, or a lie.
Is it really so hard to not lie to your users?
If Google or some other search-based service had to check every document for a match to verify that the results were accurate (to avoid false positives and negatives) then 1) search would be slow; 2) it would be expensive; and 3) the search couldn't handle many requests (as that would kill the database server).
What search engines/databases tend to do is make use of fast and efficient lookup tables or indices, then perform operations on those results (such as joining between different tables) depending on the particular search terms/options (e.g. if you are searching for a specific content type or timeframe).
There is a lot of complexity in making the numbers and results both accurate and efficient.
?afterId=x will perform much better than page based pagination and doesn't have this problem as much, but it can still cause undesired io and cache activity in the DB when you start paginating a lot to unpopular content.
That's not what it is, or at least that's not what they're trying to convince people it is. Otherwise they wouldn't the numbers on the last page.
Page 21 of about 16,890,000,000 results (0.82 seconds)
Page 22 of about 214 results (0.95 seconds)
Yeah, the GitHub API also only serves 100 pages with 100 results each max. If you want more, you need to use dirty hacks like slicing the search into blocks by sorting and filtering based on the creation date or the number of stars of a repo.
Be careful though, in my experience the results are not consistent anymore as soon as you enter low star or old repository territory, probably depending on the actual API server you hit, forcing you to query multiple times to really get (hopefully) all results. :)
I had a key-value store populated from map-reduce jobs. Lookup a key and return cached result. Refresh cache every X days. With increasing workloads, each job took longer pushing X higher and higher. So some results you'd see days old. not noticable to most.
Is it possible here that, the "count" here is stale ?
Maybe they are saving storage on the amount of results as they serve and track you on the web :-)
"Note about deep paging limitations
Due to the technical limitations of search engine technologies, it is not recommended that users page through a large number of result pages. If the number of result pages is excessive, it will be better to use faceting or more specific search terms to reduce the result set. Paging past the 100,000th item in a search result is not supported at this time. In some searches, responses may fail before 100,000 items."
https://www.loc.gov/apis/json-and-yaml/
This is what the OP states:
"A misconception regarding Google's search results is that all of the results are being served to the user conducting that particular search. Those 2 billion search results can't be gotten through Google's pagination, and it seems that this number is somewhat arbitrary to the search, or commonality of the keyword."
That seems accurate. One cannot retrieve the full number of results. The parent demonstrated this with some examples.^1
The pertinent question IMO is how many results can one retrieve. As someone who started using www search engines in 1993, that number keeps shrinking. IMO, this is a reflection of companies like Google seeking to commercialise the web for their own benefit. Google wants the web and paid advertisement to be synonymous.
With Wikipedia or LOC, one can retrieve more results that one can using Google. More importantly, the sorting order (ranking) is different. Not sure about Wikipedia but no one uses "SEO" for LOC. It is a curated collection, unlike the uwashed web. In the pre-Google era, people would choose the name "Acme" for their businesses so they could be listed first in the Yellow Pages. Google does not allow alphabetical listing. The reader should be able to figure out why. It's because the web is not curated. It is not a library. Google is only interested in what sells advertising.
Using Google from the command line (no cookies, no Javascript)
"golang" 457 results max
"god" 576 results max
"america" 448 results max
Of course Google is useful but one is kidding themselves if they believe Google is anything like a library. Libraries (public, academic) generally do not subsist on selling advertising services. Library websites and Google may use computers and similar software that have limitations but that does not mean they share the same principles. There is no reason to believe LOC would not serve all www users with more than 10000 results if the software allowed it. LOC is not promoting some results over others based on commercial objectives.
The parent may be referring to this recent HN comment allegedly from a former Google employee:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32785079
Google fans are happy if the reader conflates (a) technical limitations with (b) commercial objectives, e.g., "secret algorithms" for ranking results. Anyone using computers and software will be subject to (a) but not every entity using computers and software to assist patrons with searching its catalog (database) must engage in Google-like behaviour.
1.
YMMV, but I found Github would only return 90 results max for "golang" when searching from the command line (no cookies, no Javascript).
Wikipedia caps results at 10000. This is stated on the website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=500&offset=10000&...
This is a common problem called deep pagination, and it basically stems down to how most search systems work. When you make that search request on loc.gov, it eventually turns into a complex request for Apache Solr. Answering that request requires Solr to find all of the matching documents which match the query and any other active filters (e.g. document type, date, etc.), and calculate their rank in the search result set so it can determine which specific results are numbers 10,000-10,050. Solr/Lucene are really mature and well-tuned but when you think about how many millions of documents there are in that index, this is still calculating a pretty large temporary set only to serve 50 records, throw away the other 324k, and go on to the next query. Your next request might arrive a second later but get routed to a different replica so it’s a cold cache there, too. Click one facet on the filter list, and the search engine has to recalculate the matching documents again.
Don’t forget that you’re often seeing the results of more than just the metadata. You often get the best search results by treating entire books, newspapers, etc. as a single group for the purposes of ranking and then displaying it as a single entry on the top-level search. I wrote about this a while back: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2014/08/making-scanned-conte...
There’s an alternative which is considerably more efficient: cursor-based pagination, where instead of saying count=50 offset=10000 you say after=<unique ID/time stamp on the last result>. That allows the search engine to efficiently ignore all of the records which don’t match that, avoiding the need to calculate their rank, but comes at the cost of breaking the pagination UI: sites like loc.gov give you numbered lists of pages which humans like but you don’t have a way to calculate those after= values so your faster search isn’t as popular with advanced users.
That last part gets around to the other big factor in decisions: relatively few people do this. Most of the time, people are going to adjust their search if they don’t find what they’re looking for in the first few pages. What does do this a lot are robots which crawl every URL on a page, generating millions of permutations for every filtering option you offer. Some of those robots honor robots.txt (perhaps even correctly implemented), some have accurate user-agents, etc. but many do not and basically everyone offering a search service with a large corpus ends up having to make decisions about rate-limiting, limiting pagination depth, capping the number of filter options, etc.
Maybe it's long COVID or quiet-quitting or was it ghosting? I know it's not gaslighting. I'm trying to keep up, bear with me.
But it seems obvious that if "coffee" gives 2 billion results that, no, you're not going to be able to browse to page 187,398,384 to get those results. There's no use case for that for any normal consumer (as opposed to competitor, researcher, etc.). If you're capped at browsing the first 10 pages or whatever, that's entirely reasonable.
> A misconception regarding Google’s search results is that all of the results are being served to the user conducting that particular search.
That misconception lies only with the author. Nobody's being "served" 2 billion results, I don't even know what that would mean. The number of results being reported is quite obviously in order to allow users to judge the breadth of search queries. If it says 2 billion, you might want to refine. If it says 15 and they're all useless, go broader.
(It's useful for researching item popularity too, although that's been superseded by Google Trends which is built specifically for that.)
Not to me. I’ve tried a bunch of times to look for obscure shit I’ve seen before (and know exists) but have bumped up against the limit. This is especially annoying when the thing I’m looking for vaguely sounds like a more popular topic, and so the first 10 pages are just about the more popular version.
The solution to avoid the more popular version as much as possible is to exclude keywords associated with it, and/or to add required keywords associated only with the thing you're looking for. Exact string matches ("go programming language" rather than "go") help too.
Searching by date range doesn’t work either since it brings up current articles as well.
They’re not complaining, they’re advertising their own (paid) service (which serves Google results programatically) while at the same times being able to point to customers why they’re getting fewer results than a regular Google search (they aren’t, because Google’s number doesn’t reflect what you can look at).
But I don't agree that it's "obvious" that "you're not going to be able to browse to page 187,398,384 to get those results. I would argue that a search result is only a search result if you can actually view it. If not, it's just a marketing, or statistics.
Really easy to get clicks (and upvotes on HN apparently) by complaining about literally anything Google related.
Personally I'd prefer something like "Returned top N of 166,000 results" and easy access to those N results (first/best match, last/worst match, paginate left/right)
This is exactly my point. This article spends a thousand words to say "google doesn't actually let you see every result from the billions it claims to have."
Okay cool, I'm not gonna read a billion search results anyways, that's why I ask google about a topic.
The writing is poor, the "findings" mundane, it's a marketing fluff piece that tries to convince you there's a problem and then plug their service as a means to solve it.
The search page for coffee says "Page 1 of about 3,600,000,000 results"
How are we to know that we can't load page 360,000,000? Maybe it's obvious if you're familiar with search engine internals/algorithms, which the vast majority of people won't be.
That's because it's an ad for the service, not a real blog post.
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https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/nutrition/soy-in-dog-food-...
is the 22nd result, 31st, 45th, 59th, 73rd, and plenty from there on out.
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https://www.petmd.com/dog/nutrition/can-dogs-eat-peaches
is the 10th result, 20th, 34th, 48th, 51st, 66th, 70th, 88th, 93rd...
... and the pages start repeating from page 9 on with the previous "Soy in Dog Food?" on top.
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Have the search engines given up on search? Also, can they really say they're being gamed if they're serving the same results up multiple times? Seems more like they're picking winners.
This search is pretending like <40 results is hundreds of results, and someone had to make the effort to make sure that the same link wouldn't show up in the same page of results. That strikes me as a deliberate falsification.
edit:
As far as I can tell from
https://www.google.com/search?q=dog+food+nutrition
it seems like google are doing a hell of a lot better. Google is also banned from setting cookies or using localstorage on my machine, so the result isn't search bubbled. Nothing about soy or peaches, and no repeats are jumping out at me even 100 results in.
Very interesting to see that Google will only serve a few hundred links when they claim to have hundreds of thousands of relevant results indexed.
I'm very curious where Google is getting that count and why the reality is so different. Systematic overcounting? Suppressing hundreds of thousands of results?
Specifically, counting requires very low memory. When data is spread across 10,000 computers, all of them counting returns just 10,000 numbers i.e. 4 bytes * 10,000 = 40KB. It's easy for 1 computer to count those 10,000. Even at 100,000 computers 400KB.
Merging sorted search results is extremely memory intensive. Even with just the Id+Score pair, let's say 8 bytes. To get the 10,000th search result, each computer needs to create a List of 10,000 results, thats 10,000 * 10,000 * 8 bytes = 800 MB. For the 100,000th search result 10,000 * 100,000 * 8 bytes = 8 GB. OR if your data grows to 100,000 computers, thats 100,000 * 100,000 * 8 bytes = 80 GB of intermediate results to process at the end.
As you can see this doesn't scale well. You're required to retain context (i.e. sessions) of the search in memory instead, and get the search engine to better coordinate across all 100,000 computers. This also has scaling limitations based on memory of the session, the number of computers, the number of sessions, and their TTL (someone can leave the search page open for day and hit "next page" - should the sessions still be open? Thats an answer each search engine has to decide).
The reality is, if a customer wants deep pagination, they are better suited to a full data dump (i.e. full table scan) or using an async search API, rather than a sync search API.
The long and short of it is if you really want the full results, just join google, join the search team, and then get enough experience so that you can do full queries over the docjoins directly. This was part of Norvig's pitch to attract researchers a while ago. For a research project, I built a regular expression that matched DNA sequences and spat out the list of all pages containing what looked like DNA and then annotated the pages so in principle you could have done dna:<whatever sequence> but obviously that was not a goal for the search team.
> where Google is getting that count
This is very likely a fairly accurate of the number of pages in Google's index that "match" the search query. Basically exactly what you would expect when you see the number.
> why the reality is so different
Cost reasons. Most search engines are more or less scanning down a sorted list of pages. The further you need to scan the more expensive it is. Just like running "OFFSET 1000" is usually slow in SQL. At some point the quality of results is generally very low and the cost is growing so it makes sense overall for Google to just cut it off to prevent it becoming an abuse vector (imagine just asking Google for the 10 millionth page of results for "cat").
The fact that few people realize that Google has a page limit shows how rarely people actually want more pages.
I used to (years and years ago) go past the first page pretty often, but results are so bad now that it rarely helps, so I almost never even click "2", let alone later pages. It's all gonna be obviously-irrelevant crap google "helpfully" found for me or the auto-generated spam that google used to try to fight (circa 2008 and earlier) but no longer seems to, just letting it gunk up and dominate up any results you get that aren't from a handful of top sites.
So this is in part one of those "we broke a thing and now no-one uses it, guess they didn't want it!"
It's almost as if it tries to pad the output to be long enough that you'd lose patience before you reach the end of "effective pagination".
[EDIT] For those who weren't around for it, Google used to play cat-n-mouse with spam-site operators. It'd go through cycles where results would slowly get worse, then suddenly a ton better, though never as bad as they are today. Around '08 or '09 they (evidently, I'm just judging from the search engine's behavior starting around then and continuing to this day) seemed to give up and just boosted a relatively small set of sites way up the results, abandoning the rest to the spammers.
Google has a lot of user behavior signals to decide what should be in results 1-10. Deciding if a page should be ranked 20, 200, or 2000 without any user clicks to check if you're right is really difficult.
I would bet that since 2008/9, the relative numbers of spam site operators, Google engineers, second-page searches have changed significantly.
A small cadre of humans who were raised by an Alien Race who came across a human seed ship cross paths with this Ramjet, and one of the protagonists realizes something is off when they do a query on the size of presentable search results in the astrographic/navigational dataset, and realizes that the number of starmaps the AI will produce is far smaller than the amount of space the system actually dedicates to storing said maps.
Point being, you can't trust any system that restricts results to a subset to not actually being designed to leave out results. and it furthermore makes a great, plausibly deniable way to drop search results... Force ranking to 10001+.
You'll forgive me, I'm sure, if I question a company well known for cooperating with an anti-humanitarian regime (Project Dragonfly) and that regularly black holes other undesirable datapoints, of engaging in less than up front search result presentation, I hope?
More importantly, the people asking for a "censorship-free search engine" are expressing an incoherent desire. The whole point of a search engine is to take the zillions of web pages that have matching keywords, push the crap to the bottom, and leave the gold on top. A system that does this is inherently censorious. We're just quibbling over what the criteria should be.
What our world lacks is a reasonably-quick way to hold Google accountable when they fail to represent the interests of the public who searches with them. The real-world consenquences of their filtering decisions need to filter back to the people making these decisions. Because "just don't make any filtering decisions" isn't going to result in a usable information retrieval system.
That's not really true. `grep` is a censorship-free search engine. It just reports every matching result.
Of course that wouldn't generally be useful over the web, however even with sorting it is possible to be censorship free. You just need to include every matching result eventually.
Of course you would find that generating later pages likely also becomes expensive, so you may also add a page limit and ask the user to refine the query instead. Of course then you are back to this problem of it can be very difficult to find every result because you need to guess what words are on the page.
But all of this is basically moot because Google doesn't claim to be censorship-free so they have much simpler way of hiding results.
Do you honestly think that the people who complain about their favorite website being censored by Google would be satisfied with showing up on page 200*? I wouldn't.
It's only "not censorship" in the same sense that having your emails sent to the Spam folder isn't censorship. The spam folder, and low-scoring SERP results, are so full of items that every reasonable person acknowledges to be crap that getting banished to that area is pretty much equivalent to having someone blast your roadside protest with strobe lights and a sonic cannon. Surrounding you with so much garbage data that nobody can see or hear you any more is only "not censorship" on the dumbest technicality.
* Ignore, for sake of argument, the fact that page 200 won't even load in our universe. I'm imagining a parallel world where Google pretends to be censorship-free because they only push things far down in the results instead of removing them entirely.
My complaint has nothing to do with my favorite website. My complaint has to do with not being able to discover information and websites because Google won't allow me to dig very far into their search results. They're spidering the vast majority of the internet, and all I get are crumbs.
Google isn't designed to be a archive of every webpage matching a search result, it isn't what their infrastructure is optimized for.
I believe that's exactly what Google is. Limiting search results probably has to do with being able to serve more queries and respond quicker.
the fact is I just want the long tail or weird results to escape content farms, but I guess if it were possible for google to serve those content farms would spring up to game the long tail or weird results market.
I think the internet is closing up.
Something like "2015 camry leaking exhaust" could return nothing but "2015 camry exhaust" results until "leaking" is put in quotes (not a working example). Google search ignoring keywords was the straw that broke the camel's back - is DDG following suit?
> It's because the counts are very fast, rough estimates. And when you go into additional pages, we start to refine them.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=january+6
Once you get past page 6 of the 96 200 000 results they keep on repeating the same results, page after page, with either a Guardian (January 6 committee postpones Wednesday hearing over …) or (every now and then) Yahoo (Jan. 6 hearings to resume following bombshell revelation about …) article on top of the page. The rest of the page is largely identical, page upon page until it comes to page 32 (307-316 of 96 200 000 results). Whatever you tell it to do beyond that page it will always serve page 32 with that Guardian article on top and the other - similarly slanted - results below it.
I don't know whether this is just another example of typical Microsoft incompetence in that they make their meddling with the results so incredibly obvious or whether they're just telling visitors this is what they should read and nothing else but it does show these search engines are as unreliable when it comes to politically sensitive topics as e.g. Wikipedia is.
I don't know that what you're seeing has anything to do with politics. For example, I just searched for "dog food nutrition," (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dog+food+nutrition) and
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/nutrition/soy-in-dog-food-...
Was the 14th result, and also the 36th, 68th, and 87th. It is also the 108th result, where it first starts topping the page, and from then on it's at the top of the rest of the pages, which are repetitions, so 128th, 148th, 168th, unto infinity.
I just counted this result because it was topping the repeated page of results, but all of the other results were repeating arbitrarily until it was down to the same 20 results repeating. I'm tempted to sum the number of appearances of every result. I'm not sure there are more than 40.
Why "dog food nutrition?" I figured there would be a lot of hits. I was wrong.
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edit: https://www.bing.com/search?q=dog+food+nutrition
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/nutrition/soy-in-dog-food-...
22nd result, 31st, 45th, 59th, 73rd, and plenty from there on out.
https://www.petmd.com/dog/nutrition/can-dogs-eat-peaches
10th result, 20th, 34th, 48th, 51st, 66th, 70th, 88th, 93rd...
... and the pages start repeating from page 9 on with our old friend "Soy in Dog Food?" on top.
Here: Not logged in, Sweden, Firefox on Linux/Firefox on Android. Same results every time, on both platforms.
I took screenshots for pages 6-15, compare these to what you see and let us know in what way your results are different:
As I noted recently in a similar thread (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32923468>, HN's search through Algolia is similar.
An unqualified search reports (at this writing) somewhat north of 30 million results (30,121,402). It will display only 34 pages' worth of results, I believe 1,000 in total.
See: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> Final page: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=33&prefix=false&q...>
As discussed recently on HN, the match count is useful information even where all matching results are not displayed as it indicates whether or not a query is generic.
Contrast search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> (one result as of this writing).
I can understand some confusion on this point, but implying some sort of gross fraud or deception suggests far more wrong with the complainant, not their subject.
That said I think this could be communicated more clearly when you get to the end of the results. The fact that the results number _changes_ is an own goal that makes it seem like they have something to hide. Instead it should just say “Google Search shows a selection of the most relevant occurrences of your search term. If you didn’t find what you need, try XYZ.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/xt8jzj/complete...
For those who are behind the times on the "Dead Internet" theory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...
And at that, it performs miserably.
I want to know all content, add many different filters, sort by different properties, and get all results.
Just like I'd do with an auto sort/filter table in excel
https://medium.com/@brevityinmotion/search-the-html-across-2...
The post is basically a one year old ad for an alternative search product
For one keyword search query, first it's 9,480, then 11,800 and then 105. Changes if you click on the next page of results (page 2, 3, 4, ... 10, etc.)
How I see it is that it is like how the music search works with Google Assistant. It can do it for 90% of the songs you are likely to hear without an online connection.
For anything else it can do the search on the server.
When you search something it is not as if a billion Google servers are consulted with the results delivered accordingly. The nearest box just knows 90% of the 'answers' and you get whatever that is, rather than a 'real search'.
If you enter in a specific code, e.g. a ISBN number, then that is like the 'unusual song' that needs actual looking up.
However it works, it is a good hustle. Actually nearer to 'the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy' in having a compiled book of answers.
After all, more than 1 result is a bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
This pissed me off so much I actually registered and made http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/
And as I say on the page, the only way to approach this is to send feedback to google. We have to absolutely spam them with it so they know this is not acceptable.
Bing, btw, only ever returns 900 results.
Google really needs to stop using the word 'result' for whatever it supposedly denotes, which is probably something like the estimated number of pages crawled by Google which contain hits for those terms, the majority of which will not be a search 'result' (something delivered by the search function) under any circumstances.