Why Do Google Hit Numbers Vary?

Supa-Fly writes "I have a question about some conflicting results with the search engine google. I did a search for "pictures of mountains" and got exactly 1 million results. My friend did the same search (from the same office)and got 1,010,000 results. A second friend did the same search as the last 2 and got 1,020,000. These have not changed and every person gets the same results each time. My question is what is up with the discrepancies on google's search results?" Since this question is hard to answer from the outside, Craig Silverstein of Google kindly supplies his best answer to this question, below.

Craig writes: "Thanks for the great question. We get this from time to time and hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion. The number of estimated pages listed to the top right of a Google search results page is indeed, an estimate. It's a good estimate but still, an estimate.

There are many reasons why one might see a difference in the estimated number of pages returned for the same query. It's most likely the queries made by your co-workers were sent to different Google datacenters in what appears to have been a round-robin fashion. The index at any given Google datacenter can change slightly over the course of a day (each index is refreshed completely every three to four weeks). Depending on which datacenter finishes a query, the estimated number of results may vary.

Without having direct access to your environment it is hard for me to tell for sure, however, I believe this is the case."

Comments

My results

[Ratfood]

Results 1 - 10 of about 984,000. Search took 0.16 seconds

Peter Parker Is My Cousin

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Well, I'd say people who are generally interested in aspects of software engineering and programming in general are interested. It is true that most people aren't going to go past the first 2 or 3 pages so this 'bug/feature' isn't doing any negative harm BUT it's an oddity and I'm glad I've had it cleared up. I had never done such an experiment to see if the search result returns varied but now that I know that this happens, I'm glad to know why it happens. Of course, a little thought on the subject would probably lead to the conclusion that the searches must be being sent to different lookup engines since the same result going to the same DB will always return the same amount. And clearly Google is the type of enterprise that needs to have distributed data to distribute load.

So, long story short - who cares? I do.

"Pictures of Mountains"

[Jack William Bell]

Ya, I bet. Mountains that come in pairs. With knobbly little tips.

Yeesh...

Re:Its too bad..

[Phroggy]

D'oh! Never mind, that's not what I thought it was. I thought I saw what you described once, but this isn't it.