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Comment by overboard2 | Hacker News Reader

> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?

No, I'd expect that it would be able to generate subsequent pages on the fly.

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Why would you expect that.

Idk what technoligies google uses, but generally its kind of hard to skip directly to the i'th result of a full text index efficiently.

People expect it because it's the expectation they are told to have. When you see "1 of 200,000,000 results" you think you can scroll through all of them.

If Google would say "1 of over 1000 results" and cut off at page 10 of 100 results with a nice message saying "please refine your search query if you haven't found what you're looking for," nobody here would be complaining.

Google has done this since the beginning of Google and it is the first time that I have ever seen this is come up.

This is something that just doesn't matter.

Can you name a single site that works this way (i.e. a site offering full text search which allows you to page through more than 100,000 results of the full text search)?

I appreciate that everyone has different life experiences that lead to different expectations, but for me personally it would go without saying that google would not let you view all results to a query that returns million of results.

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