HACKER Q&A
📣 kkoncevicius

When and why did search engines start to only share top results?


I am curious about this:

Google: "cosmic rays".

Says on top: "About 17,600,000 results (0.40 seconds)".

But when scrolling through all these supposed results, at the 44th page, it displays: "Page 44 of about 433 results (1.87 seconds)". And that's it. No sign of 17 million hits advertised previously.

Anybody knows why and when did this happen?

  👤 dave4420 Accepted Answer ✓
I’m pretty sure Google was like that from the very beginning. (Maybe the 40th or 50th page of the results instead of the 44th, but the same principle.)

I don’t know why they have this behaviour… but it’s low cost: most people who can’t find the pages they’re looking for in the first hundred results aren’t going to look at the second hundred — they’ll refine their query, try a different search engine, or give up instead.

👤 activiation
Always been like this and another thing that you might not know, they change where the search results point to when you click on them... Try to right click on a search results and then hover over it. Does evil rhymes with Google?
👤 cmarschner
Those numbers are rough approximations - a query goes through deep pipelines of selecting pages, ranking and refining them in several stepsto achieve the best possible precision-recall trade-off and optimize for clicking through to the results and not come back.

It’s all optimized to show you the top 10 results, everything else is an afterthought. Part of this is because hardly anyone scroll to after link 10 anyway.