[thelist] Google results report way over the number of indexed results

liorean liorean at gmail.com
Fri Dec 2 15:32:37 CST 2005


On 01/12/05, Chris Hayes <chris at lwcdial.net> wrote:
> anybody noticed Google reporting up to 10 times the number of results it
> actually has indexed?

Well, I've noticed the same effect you have. Not come the same
conclusion, however.

> ie search all pages on your domain of 1000 pages, Google says 1 of 10,000
> results, but only goes up to 1000 when you hunt through the results.

I could explain it to you, but Tim Bray did that so much better than I
ever could: <uri:http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/26/SearchSort>

> A client of ours is going nuts, but I've been told Google is doing this all
> over the place.

I think if you really examined other search engines, you'd see about
the same. They search the index, but they don't maintain a sorted list
of more than the n most relevant hits for that search. In Google's
case, n is 1000. In others, it may be a different value. But somewhere
there is a limit, at least on any well performant search engine.
--
David "liorean" Andersson
<uri:http://liorean.web-graphics.com/>



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