Bizarre Google search results (was RE: The not-so-slow death of truthiness?)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

I discussed some of these quirks (Google's display of "relevant"
search results and problems with disjunctive searches) in this
Language Log post:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002658.html

--Ben Zimmer


On 8/23/06, Clai Rice <cxr1086 at louisiana.edu> wrote:
>
> Following up on truthiness in google groups searches, I've had a bizarre
> result. From the advanced search page, truthiness -colbert lang=English
> display 50 hits per page by date no date limit, returns 1,290 hits:
>  Results 1 - 50 of 1,290 for truthiness -  colbert (1.98 seconds)
>
> Then I go to the last display page (to see the earliest uses):
>  Results 201 - 211 of 211 for truthiness -  colbert (0.61 seconds)
>
> So are there 211 or 1290 hits? At the bottom of the last page I click on
> "repeat the search with the omitted results included." and get
>  Results 1 - 50 of 1,580 for truthiness -  colbert (0.57 seconds) !
>
> I navigate to the last display page using the Gooooogle bar at the
> bottom, either going directly to number 10 or descending one page at a
> time, and when I arrive at display page 9 I see:
>  Results 401 - 410 of 410 for truthiness -  colbert (1.10 seconds)
>
> So how many results are there, 210, 410, 1290, or 1580? The same search
> has yielded as few as 980 and as many as 1600 hits, all with the same
> display problem--410 is the maximum that are actually displayed.
>
> Does anyone know anything about a usual discrepancy between reported
> result counts and number of displyed hits?
>
> Clai Rice

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