Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query

Sep 18, 2008

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This may not be new for you people but its new for me. Whenever you Search some stuff in google. its comes back with a Huge number (I am poor in maths to count that number). I searched for my name ” Abhishek ”

Query : https://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=Abhishek

Result is in Image.

The Big Number 4,730,000. Now I want to see 1000 Result so I add &num=100&start=990 To the query.
( You can learn more about this @ Google Help Center )

So Query is

https://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=Abhishek&num=100&start=990

and the output as follows.

Hell !! only 1000 Search Results are available then why show a big number 4,730,000 . Is that sort of method to make people feel like we cawl the whole web?? why so Dear google ??

Comments

9 responses to “Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query”

Nihar

September 19, 2008

Abhishek,

This looks weird. I didn’t really try to go to very last end of page to see whether it is real or not. May be i need to try to check it…
Abhishek

September 19, 2008

@ Nihar, you can add “&num=100&start=990”
to your query on first page.

num = 100 is for show hundred query
start=990 for start showing result from 990 result.

num=10 and start value= 990 will give you the last page of search result !!
reddebt

October 19, 2008

ehm. its weird and i never know about this one. So, its not work? Maybe you can ask directly to google about this issue.
Anto

October 26, 2008

Interesting, I didn’t know that…
Nilesh

October 27, 2008

Hehe,, Nice One
syndman

November 27, 2008

Hey, I believe that the million pages count in google is true. However, the main reason for blocking results over 1,000, i believe, is to prevent other groups, websites or individuals to collect all of google’s precious data gems. Google would not want others to copy their entire database or list of all those links. If they allowed others to copy their list of results, then other websites could be as big as google, i guess!
galt

December 29, 2008

The largest amount of time in searching is taken by ranking of the result set. The result set may be millions of documents, but if ranking them will take over 1 several seconds, it is not worth the cpu time. Therefore, by cutting off at a certain result set they can insure that they will only need the to 1000. This is an optimization more then anything.
Shirley

January 4, 2009

Wow, I didn’t know about this.

Funny, I criticized Cuil for this very thing. Of course, they were even more outrageous. They claimed to have indexed more pages than Google. And when you did a search you’d see some astronomically large number. But then, they’d only show you 12 or 15 results… I always felt cheated.

So I agree. What’s the point of returning an enormous number when you aren’t going to show it. It’s a bit of a tease, and I don’t like it! haha. 🙂

As for reasons that they might do this, it could be to protect data as syndman suggests, or to minimize cpu time as galt suggest, but I think that they are probably guessing that no one would ever get past 1000 results. After all, based on ‘relevancy’, results in that range would probably not be a good match for the initial query.
tk

February 13, 2009

i think the idea is that people may use automated programs to just crawl through massive lists of results for images, wheras for an average user 1000 is plenty.

If you are getting too many results then you should think about trying to narrow down your query