

Ask HN: Why does Google say X million results and only gives up to Y? - rokhayakebe

Why is it that Google will say 100,000,000 results but lets you only search up 1000. Also why is it that most of the results at the bottom are sometimes from the same site?
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dalke
I just did a search for "football checkers acequia moon" (without the quotes).
It says there are about 11,400 pages, but when I go through them it ends up
with 221 pages. I assume the estimation is based on some statistical
predictions using the individual search words. Here they are relatively common
terms (well, except 'acequia') which rarely go together.

I found <http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008851.html> say "I
work for google these days, though not on search. The number of hits for
phrases are estimates, based on overall word frequencies". The invalidity of
the estimated results has been haphazard for a long time. See
<http://danfingerman.com/dtm/archives/000004.html> from 2003.

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pivo
I imagine that the first part of the question has to do with paging. The first
page is just the first n hits. But for subsequent pages they need to start at
the beginning and skip page size * page number hits until they get to the hits
for the current page. That gets expensive, so much so that they don't let you
do it past 1000.

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Rantenki
Because they walk a small part of an index to figure out how many hits there
_probably_ are.

Geez; you think they actually count a giant left join on the internet?

Also: <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/26/SearchSort>

