Why doesn't gmail accurately determine the number of e-mails during a search?

Factual Questions
1

I’m cleaning out my gmail account. I start by doing a keyword search of senders I know send a lot of e-mails. My settings show 100 e-mails per page.

For example, I’ll search for the name of my bank.

On the first page, the number-of-results “counter” at the top right says, “1-100 of about 183”.
So then I click the next page, “101-200 of many”
Then I click again, “201-300 of many”
Once more, “301-391 of 391”. And that’s the last page.

I’ve done this with a number of other common keywords and end up with a similar result. Either the count estimate is off by 50%+, or it says “of many”.

I assume that gmail/Google have programmers that can accurately count the number of results. What is the reason for why the count is inaccurate or incomplete?

2

The database query ceases when enough results have been returned to fill a results page, and an estimate is then made on how many other results there might be. Working on the principle that people will generally be more interested in recent emails, this is a huge efficiency saving when scaled up to the user base of gmail. How the decision is made whether to display “about <number>” or “of many”, I don’t know.

They do something similar with web search results - few people look beyond the first couple of pages.

3

Previous thread on this topic.

4

Perfect, thanks!

5

…heh heh heh:

And three years later google said there were seven pages of results, but there only three. :slight_smile: We must check again in another three years. :smiley: