Would anyone even notice if search engines only indexed the top million sites?

I once wrote up a short description of how to beat a certain puzzle. For "how to beat X" where X is the name of the puzzle, my page is #1 in both Google and Bing, and has been for years. Top 10 when "beat" is replaced with "solve" or "win at".

My site is nowhere near the top million, so anyone having trouble remembering my solution who went searching for it would notice if only the top million sites were indexed.

BTW, the reason I am not naming the puzzle in this post is because I've done no SEO on the page, and I think I've only posted links to it maybe once or twice, 7 or 8 years ago, in comments on Slashdot or usenet. According to Google, no one links to it. Yet somehow the search engines found it, and decided it was the most relevant page for beating X. I'm curious to see how long that continues, and don't want to do anything to disturb the natural traffic.

I visit many unpopular websites, often through search engines, such as to find out little details about video games, techniques for DIY organic lawncare, concepts used in unconventional programming languages, explanations of physics and philosophy from retired university professors, and many other things that have even less popularity, such as learning how to speak and write in the dialects of English called E-Prime and P-Prime. The probability that the top one million websites would include all of the websites that I use is very nearly 0%, so the probability that I would notice is near 100%.

My gut reaction is yes, people would notice. Many people have interests or hobbies in niche areas. It may not be the majority, but I believe a significant proportion of useful search results come from the long tail.

I just Googled for, "How to do funny looking e on Mac" and got the answer I'm looking for.. like @recursive mentioned, a "significant proportion of useful search results come from the long tail."

Oh btw, é!

This is very confusing. The product description & apparent functionality completely contradict how the press describes it:

Product description:

> "allows you to ONLY OBTAIN search results from up to the top 1 million websites (or top 100k, 10k, 1k, 100) sites."

Representative press clipping from the same page:

> "Making the Web wild again: New search engine ignores popular websites"

My theater company's Facebook page shows up so I guess people could still find us, but it's hardly the best way. My open source project shows up only because of my resume. I wouldn't use this. It finds stuff, but it's pretty much always the least relevant link.

I'd notice it during googling of my own projects to find out how popular they are. Sometimes I think nothing I ever write will be as popular as the program that let people beat neopets.

How do you determine the top million sites if you don't index all the sites?