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Why Do Google Hit Numbers Vary?

Posted by timothy on from the horse-mouth-opens dept.

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."

11 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Frost Poipi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    am I close nigger?

    1. Re:Frost Poipi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      What the hell is this? Am I reading this correctly? Get rid of this please.

      please delete abacsalmasi's post plz. He'z the nigger.

    2. Re:Frost Poipi by liquidflare · · Score: -1, Troll

      What a fucking jewed up nigger that abacsalmasi is.

  2. Google Guesses? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Woot!

  3. My results by Ratfood · · Score: 0, Troll

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

  4. Re:IN CHINA by gambit-punjabi · · Score: -1, Troll

    They weren't allowed to use Google..instead they used eglooG. How'd they come up with such a wierd name? Who knows.

  5. Peter Parker Is My Cousin by Acidic_Diarrhea · · Score: 0, Troll
    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.

    --
    I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
  6. "Pictures of Mountains" by Jack+William+Bell · · Score: 0, Troll

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

    Yeesh...

    --
    - -
    Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
  7. Re:Its too bad.. by Phroggy · · Score: 0, Troll

    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.

    --
    $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
    $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  8. yawn by djupedal · · Score: -1, Troll

    Google is over rated. Who said they 'completely swapped out'? ...that's cute. I'm still not biting.

    Right, I don't think it is interesting. There, I've said it twice, once just for your benefit. Not likely to make an AC happy, but someone has to slap 'em around. Don't you have a cereal box to read, or something that needs changing? Jump my shit again and I'll tell your sister.

  9. Ask Craig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Dear Craig,

    Why do goatses suddenly appear, every time you are near?