> 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?
Yes.
Yes.
Is the theoretical amount of results the important part? Or the results itself?
Let's imagine you go to your imaginary mentor to ask a question. Your mentor can give you thousands of answers - they are a creative person - would you really even care about all those answers, or do you want only one or few (more) accurate?
But fair point, if I were an immortal person with infinite amount of time I too would want to see ALL the results, not only the "best".
Would you use an SQL database that doesn't return a proper result set to your query or take LIMIT and OFFSET into account?
(But I may be strange here, dunno. I am alright with using suboptimal tools - like WordPress for my eshop, haha...)
Everything I've heard and seen (thanks to remote work I can work alongside them now) has shown me that Google's culture is fundamentally based on Googler egos. Their weirdness about org charts and levels really exemplifies it (org chart and level are obscured from you - contrast this with Amazon, for instance).
But how can you pay a bunch of 20 something’s 200K+ and have them around other equally entitled people and not expect some amount of smugness.