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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this is because googles search engine rarely returns more than 40 results for any query these days. Sure, it says "X million results", but if you actually start to scroll, you soon run out.

Eg. a search for "facebook" only has 68 results!

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I didn't know this, but you're right: 56 results for Facebook! Not even very good results, just the usual random SEO spam mixed with relevant results.

If this isn't an error, this is a HUGE change?

I would think that any more than one would be incorrect.

I can imagine you might want news about facebook.

You might also be looking for third parties commenting on the trustworthyness or not of facebook as a service/company.

You might be after investing info in meta.

You might want to install their app

you might want help logging in or a guide to setting up an account.

I'd consider all of the above relevant enough to be worthy of a position on the results page.

Yes, but they include a box for news in the first page. I assume 90% of people who search for google /facebook/youtube intend to go to the site itself. And if they want specifics they just type in the additional keywords. so this would be

Facebook trustworthiness Facebook stock Facebook app Facebook account setup help

. I guess google is no longer a "search engine" as in doing a keyword search across multiple webpages and returning the matches, but an AI powered answer engine that guesses what you want based on your keywords and only returns those results.

While you could potentially justify it by evoking an ill defined query intent detection, X returning less results than X+Y will always be surprising for me.

But why? That is the naïve assumption from the context of primitive search techniques, but in the space of actual answers I think its going the right thing. Just give the user what they asked for.

I think this approach is probably in line with Google's, or at least it seems like it. Trying to intuit what I really want instead of paying attention to what I actually searched for is also one of the big reasons why I find Google search to be terrible.

I am not its target demographic, it appears.

Often I'm surprised at how I just seem to be wired differently from others - if I wanted any of the above, I'd probably search for them instead of just "facebook".

Facebook dot com.

Facebook article on Wikipedia.

Perhaps an entry for the movie as well.

Maybe some information on the stock.

I think a single result would be wrong.

Here's what I would search for for each of those.

facebook

facebook wiki

facebook movie

facebook stock (though I of course know the ticker symbol is FB, so I'd just type that into Yahoo Finance and it would know how to handle that)

edit: I guess it's a reflection of my distrust of Google/most (all?) large companies - I really don't like it when they guide me in any direction other than what I've specified because I'm pretty sure it's some dark pattern designed to relieve me of my money.

I dislike needing to be this verbose with search engines, and hate it with voice assistants too. I’d rather a little inference than to have to be explicit every time

I don't really understand why that distrust doesn't seem to extend to wanting them to display a single result for something, as if you can trust that single result to be what you want?

That's a fair point - I could be wrong about my motivation there; I was more or less thinking out loud.

The ticker is meta

I think search should also output links to some Facebook scandals, about Cambridge analytics, clearview, some research papers how Facebook affects children, speech rules dramas, Facebook myanmar scandal.

I think one would have to explicitly search for these terms for anything like it to appear.

If not then search should not be used to discover new topics.

On that note: "nobody" (nobody commercial, providers) wants "organic" results anymore. They want "filtered", algorithmic, "suggested" and the like. Besides, if their "secret sauce" algos are so good (such as they indeed are) at determining what will hit you the best, with the best likelihood of "engagement" (for whatever that is for the system in question), any extra effort put beyond the very few, first, results, is an inefficiency, and adds cost, so ...

The sad part is, with them down ranking http only sites, and with all the spam farms, going 10+ "pages" in, eg 100+ links, used to be an easy way to get to real results.

Then they added infinite scrolling, and oh well!

They should add a "this site hasn't changed in a decade" or "only give http results" for people searching for older stuff.

Google takes these weird stances, like making it impossible to find legacy sites (http sites) because they want to push encryption (fine, but don't hurt users!).

Or refusing to add zoom + reflow on chrome (super simple to do, just use a virtual dpi), showing how little they care about those with vision issues, or the aged. Why? Repeatedly they've stated it is to "punish" sites not updating for mobile.

Well, even mobile sites are hard to see for some. What a ridiculous, absurd, stupid response.

The only people they are punishing is the sight impaired, or the aged. Thanks Google.

You seem to be under assumption that they make changes for benefit of the user, but not the adtech.

This is extremely weird assumption when talking about google.

It's not extremely weird, when they stated both of those reasons, multiple times, in press releaes and bug reports.

I am well aware of where their profits come from, but when going after them in the public sphere, you must address, and refute the reasons they publicly cite.

Also note, often there are multiple reasons. By ripping down their stated reasons, and showing the absurdity of them, and also validating how it literally hurts accessibility for those with visual disabilities, you doubly ahow them to be an organization filled with uncaring individuals, which care not for accessibility.

Personally, I wouldn't want to work in a place that wouldn't put in a wheelchair ramp. I wouldn't want to work with people that accept that. Yet that's Google.

What does it say about those working there?

Google wants you to be only focused on a small set of results, mostly the ads at the top of the results. They'd rather you refine your search giving them more data and more chances to show you top ad spots than let you scroll/next through results.

Yes, Google made the Internet boring for ears now.

How many results would you expect for terms like "war", "peace", "elon musk", "bill gates"? I would expect billions. Google has the data. So why does it not want to share it with you?

- One reason might be that you will not be interested in articles from 2011... but that is quite sinister to me. Why Google should decide if I want to see results from around Bush administration?

- Second reason is that some links are not safe for Google. Google will not show you results for emulation, because it might violate some patents, IPs. It plays nice to the point in destroys the Internet.

- That is why I created list of domains https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database. I can search for something using my own off-line Internet meta data

- The other thing is someone mentioned to me that it is easier to maintain small list of links, which you can blocklist. For political reasons it is difficult to show the world as is

- Google is a potemkin village that showed you really good result as the first link, while trimming all the remaining links. Redirecting traffic from small sites to corporate overlords, since it made good deals with them

- In era where Internet is full of walled gardens, I think even Google might struggle to scrape everything from facebook, or amazon

It is sinister. The internet is just not a good resource for reliable information. There are some databases that are good resources, but they are not on the public internet. The few good public databases like Archive.org are being litigated into oblivion. The powerful people in the US have decided that they want the internet to be like the old network news.

For a brief moment in time, the internet was pretty good. Not anymore. It is a place to go to be censored, monitored, exploited, and to receive your maintenance level of corpo-gov propaganda. The "social" features are just there to create illusions of real activity and for various "let 1000 flowers bloom" type propaganda operations in which lonely people are baited into stating extreme positions before they become victims of a 1984 five minute hate session.

I think the only real conversations happen on rare outposts like this, a few smaller subreddits, and the vast majority on Discord.

There's so much human creativity they've locked up, that would otherwise be accessible for the benefit of the curious or bored.

To get a taste of the old Internet I sometimes use https://wiby.me/ , which gives you results like older search engines used to.

> Sure, it says "X million results"

Google also removed that few months ago.

It's still available, just hidden in the search tools.

Yea, you have to click "Tools" to see the number of search results and the time it took for Google to retrieve information. Again, idk why they hid that.

Those counts have always been wildly inaccurate, to the point that engineers on the team were embarrassed to be displaying them, but product people felt it was important to the user experience anyway so kept it. Nice to see the engineers finally getting a win there.

(I worked on Google search like 15 years ago. I'm assuming they haven't found a way to make the estimate any more accurate, since it was seen as intractable at the time.)

when i search Google for "facebook", i get less than 100 webpages.

Google says it processed "About 25,270,000,000 results (0.28 seconds)"

why can't i see those 25 billion results? what are "results"?

Previously, in recent years, when not "logged in", total results were capped at around 250. With the "AI" hype, it has now dropped even further. Perhaps more people will notice. With some searches, today I get less than 20 results. This is highly amusing given the claims about the size and scope of Google's index. These are not obscure queries. I am 100% certain the terms appear in hundreds if not thousands of web pages. Then I try the same query on a Bing-based search engine and I see the results Google is hiding.

In the early days web search engines had no such filtering; I used to browse page after page of results to discover nuggets of useful information. Back then, I wonder how many people would have believed the claims about how many pages were allegedly searched unless they could actually browse deep into the results.

Even if there are more results, there are basically useless past, 10, maybe 20.

They shove all the mainstream trash down our throats, even if it's not remotely related to the query, while never bothering with it really was.

Funny. I get 50 results for "facebook" - ending with:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 50 already displayed.

"Infinite" scroll until I hit that message (no pagination).

If I search for "foo" - it will show a "More results v" button after about 50 and keep on doing that.

I am in Germany.

Now I’m wondering what the missing 6 (from the OP 56) are compared to German results?!

I don't remember seeing it any more for a very long time. Yeah, it felt like scam.

Not to mention the same results get recycled over and over again.

Google is dead. What’s next? Kagi?

I'm already seeing the paginated search result page, perhaps I got assigned to the right AB test bin.

And I can confirm, I searched for "facebook" and got 7 pages of results; last page was YouTube results only.

On Firefox this has always been the case for me.

Same for me - I never saw anything else than paginated search result. Maybe for some reason Firefox didn't get this feature?

I got 55, though a search limited to the past year (as of 6/26/2024 EST) yielded 188 results, somehow. Still too low but also contradictory.

If you hit the last page on the pagination bar, they just keep concatenating new page indexes at the end, so that it effectively grows infinitely large...

It doesn't actually say that any more for me on google, I think they removed it at some point when it obviously didn't make sense any more.

Probably curated by an intern.

this is interesting ! do u know when they started doing this ?

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