Google search question

Factual Questions
1

I searched “Steven Pinker” on Google who found 840,000 pages, but I can get only 787 pages. What about the other 399,800 pages ?
Just curious. I don’t really need more than one page…

2

By default, google will not actually list pages that it detects as ‘nearly identical content’, though it will include them in its count. Thus, possibly there are 787 different pages, but a lot of them have thousands and thousands of mirrors, duplicates, or copies spread around the web.

If it’s not that, then I dunno.

3

If one is enough then as Alfred E. Newman was wont to say: “What? Me Worry!” :wink:

4

Yeah, Google counts are notorious for being wrong. Part of it may be spam-type pages (they pop up for a lot of searches, of course) - I’m not sure. But they are often vastly, vastly incorrect. This poses problems with the use of Google to find phrases as a quick-and-dirty search for linguistic specimens.

5

I got 347,000 resultsand it showed me 779.

Then, I chose to “repeat the search with the omitted results included” and the count was 348,000 results, and it showed me 987.

There’s obviously something severely wrong with the counts.

6

Just as an experiment (I’d never search such a thing :wink: ) I googled “sex” and it came up with 211,000,000 results.

It could only show me 888 of them.

Interesting, this was at the bottom of the page:

  • In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.*

Anyway, repeating the search with omitted results gave me 996.

See, the internet isn’t really full of smut…google has been exagerating. There’s more Steven Pinker than sex!

7

If you type this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sex&start=9000
you will get
“Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 9000.)”

8

Forgot to say that the search was for five languages, that’s why I got more results…

I tried the link you suggested, Polerius, but I replaced sex with Steve Pinker (or a flower name) and it always starts with the first page or nothing at all. However if you write less than 1000 you get the correct page. So you’re right. It doesn’t serve more than 1000.

This also answers one thing I always wondered about: What if I want to find page 6700 ? Answer: No way!

Thanks everyone.