# Google News: Understanding 'Number of Results'

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-news-understanding-number-of-results/760778>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 24, 2016, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-news-understanding-number-of-results/760778 "2016-07-24T15:44:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![andrea\_green](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecccb3/32.png) [@andrea\_green](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/andrea_green)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2016, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-news-understanding-number-of-results/760778/1 "2016-07-24T15:44:43Z")

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A project I’m involved in recently went viral and we were pleased to see many news articles pop up all around the world. One thing we couldn’t quite wrap our heads around though was the significance of the “number of results” as indicated for any given search on [news.google.com](http://news.google.com) (when viewed from a desktop). In our case, a made up word that wasn’t really used before we launched suddenly displayed “68,000” results on Google news. This is in no way a reflection of the number of news articles about us, so what does that funny number actually mean?

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**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2016, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-news-understanding-number-of-results/760778/2 "2016-07-24T18:34:13Z")

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That number is just a very rough estimate and changes even as you browse between result pages for the same query: [Why Google Can't Count Results Properly](http://searchengineland.com/why-google-cant-count-results-properly-53559)

It’s an artifact of their distributed indexing system. At any given moment, Google doesn’t really know how many results there are for a specific query; it just samples a subset of that and tries to extrapolate/estimate the total.

Also, if you publish something on a major news site, it’s very likely that bots and feed repeaters (think blogspam) will pick it up and republish it everywhere. Google is pretty good but not perfect at filtering out those dupes…