600613

IvyMike 11 years ago |

> Most numbers of this magnitude garner a few thousand hits on Google, but 25898913 gets 29,500,000.

If you actually click through the results, on pages 1-34 you get "Page 34 of about 24,900,000 results (0.34 seconds) ", but on page 35 you discover that there are only actually 341 results.

ajani 11 years ago | |

I've found this to be consistent behaviour with Google. The number of search results tend to be totally unreliable. I don't know if they use the same search algorithm for gmail, but the same problem occurs there as well. Initially it might say 1-50 of 100 results, go to the second page and suddenly it's 50-100 of 2000. And on the next page 100-150 of "many".

Google search-hit count has never been fully accurate - I say this empirically from use over the years, and having tried to use the number of hits in some random experiment I can no longer remember.

vtlynch 11 years ago | | |

Google acknowledges this: https://support.google.com/gsa/answer/2672285?hl=en

I remember seeing a more in depth article about this but cant find it at the moment.

Chinjut 11 years ago | | |

So apparently it is possible to get an accurate result count (for up to 1 million results) using "rc = 1"? Does anyone have an examples illustrating this behavior (I can't seem to contrive one where it makes a difference)?

ajani 11 years ago | | |

I suspect rc=1 applies to enterprise search.

Chinjut 11 years ago | | |

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

arikrak 11 years ago | |

It's a bit ridiculous how Google shows those numbers on top and people constantly quote there are X results for Y when the real results are always far off from that. There are 382,000 results for {number of "google results"}!

FreeFull 11 years ago | |

Sounds like an odd bug in how Google works.

vitd 11 years ago |

It would be nice to change the title to something coherent and useful, like, "Search queries containing only numbers," or something of that sort. As such, there's not a lot of incentive to click on "600613". (Yeah, I did it, mostly just to make this post coherent.)

vog 11 years ago | |

Well, I was expecting something about the "Google projection" for maps, unofficially noted as the slightly different EPSG:900913 [1] until finally standardized as EPSG:3857 [2].

[1] http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/243/google-projection-900...

[2] http://www.epsg-registry.org/report.htm?type=selection&entit...

bowmessage 11 years ago |

In response to the trivia question: I'm assuming that it's impossible to find some N wit fewer than 10 digits. In all of my attempts I've received results relating to phone number reverse-lookup sites.

There also seems to be this website which exists just to generate a page full of numbers with any given prefix (defined in the URL):

http://www.qzonecom.com/mobile/maanshan_511556.html

Why?!

sssss3333 11 years ago | |

That's my favorite thing about the internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cghg-QyTP_M No reason

malkia 11 years ago |

A new type of business: find a number that's not yet in google/bing/etc. - embded it in your text, and then track who's copied you verbatim - some kind of tracking I guess..

pavel_lishin 11 years ago |

10,041,295,923 now returns exactly one result - the author's page, just as he theorized.

I wonder if it'll return two results soon.

ikeboy 11 years ago | |

https://archive.today/j8KXp Now it does!

guidopallemans 11 years ago |

website is under a heavy load, here is the cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MvuGGDF...

moonfern 11 years ago |

The about "number" results should give an idea but it might not be accurate, tells google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ix3mHeL7hg

Anyway you only get the first 1000 results of your googling.

alex_duf 11 years ago |

I think it's a matter of scale. The scale of the human race gives us a range of number that are humanly comprehensible. Their distribution diminishes as they make less and less sense to our scale.

ozh 11 years ago |

That is pretty much the kind of posts I come to HN for. Thanks for the read :)