I bet you love Google. We certainly do at Port80. Yet, like it or not, at times in any relationship you can start questioning your love, and something we noticed recently just didn’t sit well with us: We have found that that they appear to put a bit of spin on Google's search results.
For example, look at the stats provided for this quick Google query on "Ajax library" (run it yourself: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Ajax+library):
A whopping 12,400,000 references were found by Goggle in a mere .09 seconds. Hot damn, that's fast! And double damn, that's a lot of info on Ajax libraries, and hopefully these aren't mentions about cleaning your library with Ajax, but about writing code.
Anyway, jests aside, we tried to get to really dig into the results -- you know, go beyond the first page. Away we go, starting to page through, and we get to only 661 results… where Google politely informs us that it has omitted stuff that we shouldn't care about:
So, we try again with the omitted results, and this time we get to 1000 results and no further:
You can try as you like with the Advanced Results, even changing the number of results to 100 per page, and you will get no farther than 1000. Try it yourself here.
So, it turns out there might be 12 million or more references to “Ajax library“ that Googlebots have discovered on the Web, but you can only have 1000 -- so much for the long tail idea. In fact, if you think about it, this is roughly 0.008% of the total content you can access on the query“Ajax library”. So, if you query for something super common like "html":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=html&btnG=Google+Search
... you will get about 9,430,000,000 results -- but again only 1000 available for you to actually search! In this case, it a whopping 0.00001% of the search results that Google says are available.
However, to be fair, if your result set is below 1000, you may be able to get them all, but watch a bit of slight of hand happen here: Query for "fie foo fum 123", and you may see 520 results available. Try to access the results, and you get to 291, a bit over half. If you retry with omitted results you get now 517, but as you page through the result set, it magically drops by one which you can reach. It seems really fishy how these numbers are calculated -- and if they have any value.
If you go looking around on the Web, you will find that, lo and behold, other folks have seen this (http://www.googleguide.com/last_results_page.html), but it isn't really as commonly known as you'd expect.
So, we still love Google, but let's call that bar on the right what it really is: marketing and branding! Yes, Mr. Google, you are fast, and yes, you are big, but since you really can't do anything with it, the “data” is about as useful as the signs where McDonald's tell you about how many burgers they have served.
Sincerely,
Graham A.
300 Millionth American Citizen and Future Port80 Employee
PS: Not to pick on Google exclusively, it is similar at Yahoo. If you query for “Ajax library”, you find 5.9 million results but are also limited to 1000 viewable results. Check it out here.