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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

It is easy to think that this is normal. And I can think of many non crappy reasons that it became so.

That said, I do think it hinges on dishonest. Even if well intended, there is absolutely no faith in thinking that there were actually that many meaningful hits on any of these searches. Nor is there really much gained by presenting such large numbers.

I can almost buy that it is intended directionally to help refine search terms. But, the numbers are so silly large that I don't. Especially as there is no way to see the last results to know exactly why they count as hits, but are not worth serving.

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If you look at the number of results rather than the results themselves, you clearly care about the number. The number is the information. It can answer a question like: How many books in the Library of Congress contain the word "God"?[1]

Similarly whenever I've looked at the number of results in Google it was to judge how common something is. For example, if I want to know the most commonly used spelling between two options, I Google both and check the number. That's what the number is helpful for, and really the only thing it could be helpful for. It is its own information.

[1] I know the question might need to be revised for the number to reflect the answer accurately; you get the idea.

But that number has no way of inspecting it to know what it actually means. Is it including prefix searches? Suffix? Whole word only? Possible misspellings? Acronyms? Translations?

I get that it can be somewhat directional, but I question that anyone is getting meaningful data out of it. :(

You can in some cases compare different keywords to each other.

Also, some pages are mirrored all over the internet.

You've just opened a can of worms. It raises a very interesting question: when asking something like

> if I want to know the most commonly used spelling between two options

do those mirrors count as "use" of the word? Or does "use" refer only to the original writer?

If a neologism is written once and read by millions, it carries more weight than one read by only a few people. Perhaps the same goes for spelling variants: the more people see it, the more people agree it's the typical spelling. Lots of mirroring could be a decent proxy for lots of readership.

The number is not _the_ information. It's just _some_ information. When I search the web I want the content, and very very rarely care about the actual number of results. So yeah, showing a search result count they can't actually serve is dishonest and gives a false sense of reality.

No, in context of what I said (when the number is what you're looking at) the number is the information. If the content is what you care about, the number being 2 million or 5 million is meaningless because you'll never get through all the content.

This reads more like a sign saying "over x customers served" on a fast food restaurant. It doesn't really matter, nobody will ever care about the accuracy of the information, but it's a pride thing and makes a point about the establishment.

Obviously there aren't millions of meaningful hits on most terms, but you don't need to go to page 10001 for that. You can get to page 3 and know it for sure.

I'd argue that, to a layman, if it is obvious that there aren't that many meaningful hits, then there weren't that many hits. :(

This does call back to the odd false confidence that our industry bakes into the interview process. "Design a realtime chat program that can notify any number of followers that you posted and let them respond with sub millisecond latency."

I can’t push a single key in less than 20ms latency. Those poor interviewees are building Twitter but for bots. Unfortunately, that is probably a relevant skill…

The number of search results is plenty useful. Even for grammar! If spell checker isn't of help, use Google and see which option is more popular (I used to use it often when I wrote more in my native language, which has a few peculiarities). It can give valuable insight in popularity of different things.

I do hold the number of results trustworthy (not exact, but a good estimate). Having the index in the Inverted Index format, and efficient joins (solved problem), it's just about getting the size of the term list and summing over the shards. Something that Google anyway has to do for the regular retrieval.

right, I would understand "found 10k results but can only show the first 1k, please refine your search".

That's reasonable. But as you said, what they're doing now is bordering on dishonest.

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