"a day that will live in infamy" (in a positive way)

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Sat Jun 2 17:07:58 UTC 2012


This has been happening since the latest incarnation of GB search. The
search routinely inflates the number of hits--sometimes by a factor with
three or four digits--when showing more than 10 hits. Usually, the
number of hits can be better estimated by a quick look at the page
counter at the bottom. I set my advanced GB search to "show 30 per page"
and that only started working this year. But the advantage is that the
page count on the bottom is more accurate than the projected number of
hits. So if the counter shows "1 2 3", then it's less than 90 pages. In
fact, as you move along, the count often goes down, as it did in the past.

The bottom line, pay little attention to the hit count. As long as it's
under about 50000, it's going to be manageable. Any number showing
that's above that, and the number of actual hits will be in the hundreds.

     VS-)

On 6/2/2012 12:35 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> But for your annoyance, try searching Google Books for "verklempt"
> before 1975. (There are no hits before 1950.) GBooks claims about 612
> results, but shows only a half dozen and behaves strangely when any
> page beyond the first is selected.

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