Comments on: The red tape protest has started

Ummm…people? Why is this whole “woot this million results” thing important? Shouldn’t we be discussing the actual issue, not some random search engine that has little bearing on the real world? Its only electrons, after all.
I personally think the red tape thing is brilliant.
Time to ship a dozen crates of it to that Obamanation we have for president. Or wish that I could even get my hands on it.

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By: Tel

Tel — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:06:50 +0000

You guys should understand that those numbers that show up in google are estimates based on a statistically efficient but strictly imperfect indexing system. Once there are more than a million hits on a given topic, then search engine knows perfectly well that no one is going to thumb through a million items so it never actually checks them all, most of the computational effort goes into pruning the list back to the most relevant items.

For example, when searching for “climategate”:

Results 1 – 10 of about 5,280,000 for climategate

Then thumb some pages deeper:

Results 521 – 530 of about 27,000,000 for climategate
Results 701 – 710 of about 3,810,000 for climategate

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 740 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

That’s the last page in the stuff that a “normal” search would bother collecting, a total of 740 items. But they index knows perfectly well there are millions of items — only 740 are considered important enough to actually get looked at by the algorithm.

If you force it to go as deep as possible, you get down to:

Results 991 – 1000 of about 3,780,000 for climategate

Note that the query time gets bigger and bigger for the deep search so google don’t let you go past 1000 items to prevent their servers getting trashed by a single massive query.

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By: Roy Hogue

Roy Hogue — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:59:07 +0000

Nick,

As a guess — I don’t know for sure — Google does a literal search on your query. Bing supposedly applies some “intelligence” to your query, which may account for the difference.

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