Does anyone know what is going on with Google result counts?

May 2, 2022 8:19 AM

Google result counts seem to be completely random - first page shows millions of results, but as I page through, many of these dwindle down to a few hundreds or less. This behaviour seems to have gone truly of the rails recently, with even popular words returning in the low hundreds. What is going on? Is Google truly completely compromised as a valid search engine?

I'm working on a new project where I need ball-park info on number of pages containing certain terms. Some of the terms are fairly obscure (and possibly wrong - they are in several languages, some of which I don't speak), so I thought the low figure might be a good reflection of quality results (with poorer quality results being omitted).

However, when googling terms such as 'Easter' returns fewer than 500 results with omitted results included (pages stop at 44, even tough all pages until last indicate more than 1 billion results), something is up.

Does anyone know what is going on with this? Any recommendations for getting somewhat more accurate results?

Google has been clearly going downhill badly, but this is ridiculous.

Thanks for any pointers

posted by doggod to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I went looking for the blog post where google talks about now using AI to guess what you are “really” searching for instead of what you types, but was unsuccessful. I did find this breakdown that matches what I remember of it. Which is to say - none of those pages is even actually for sure going to have your search term. And the page counts are totally made up.
posted by Bottlecap at 9:24 AM on May 2, 2022

I think Google gives up giving more results, because, you're not going to magically find what you are looking for on page 45 that wouldn't have been on page 1-44. You're going to adjust your search terms. Google's search isn't for answering the question you want to ask.

It's pretty obvious that more than a billion pages will have the word Easter in them, but if you want all billion pages what you need is a crawler, not a search engine.

The first estimate truly is a "ball-park". It's very expensive to count to millions or billions for every word which could exist, so it guesses. I'd just use its guess from the second page for every term. (The first page is programmed to respond as fast as possible, so I would guess the second page might have a better estimate, but that's just a hunch)
posted by flimflam at 10:31 AM on May 2, 2022

Google search result counts are meaningless and have been for a long time.

Should Google put more effort into showing an accurate count? Maybe, but counting results isn't really the primary job of a search engine -- the primary job is finding the most relevant pages for your query. And given the complexity of the modern web, calculating an accurate count for any arbitrary search term is a mind-bogglingly complicated problem.

Really, they shouldn't show a count at all, since it's so misleading.
posted by mekily at 10:56 AM on May 2, 2022

Maybe you’d be better served by the Google Books Ngram Viewer or Google Trends?
posted by Monochrome at 11:32 AM on May 2, 2022

While it's no guarantee that your results will be any better, google does have a "verbatim" search buried somewhere in the UI that might be better than the default. On mobile you get to it after doing a search, then "search tools" on the far right above the results, and the "all results" dropdown on the row below will allow you to select "verbatim".
posted by juv3nal at 3:04 PM on May 2, 2022

Long ago I made a distinct effort to click through all the search results for some term, even then actual pages was totally different than any of the results counts. I think that number has been some heuristic indicates this is a specialized term or it's so common that there are more pages that could ever be looked at.
posted by sammyo at 6:05 PM on May 2, 2022