 Clive wrote: |
Hi guys,
The number of results Google gives you on the first page . . . could even be wrong by 10,000% sometimes
I didn't know this. Do you mean Google has an error in its actul counting? Can you please explain a bit more?
Thanks, Clive |
|
Hi Clive,
yes, Google isn't supposed to give you the exact number of results, it isn't even supposed to actually give you the number of results. It is supposed to be a search engine, and to give you what you are searching for, not the number of results. No one cares about the number of results. Who searches Google to see the number of results? No one but some ESL learners. But Google is not an ESL tool. All the common internet users use Google to find what they are looking for, and no one cares about the number of results. Isn't it true? So if Google results are wrong, it's only a problem for learners... that's why Google doesn't care if the number of results is correct or not, and will never fix that. Now, look what Google actually do:
Type
"book entitled" site:nytimes.com (exactly that, with quotation marks too)in the search box. Look at the number of results. Now check the other pages (at the bottom, click on 10, and then 19, etc. so as to check the following pages. Then you reach the last page. How many results are there now?
Now do the same with
"me and my mother are" (exactly that). In this case it is wrong by approximately 4,500%.
Now try
"I and my mother is", wrong by approximately 60,000%
If you compare these last two examples only by looking at the number of results on the first page, you will see that "I and my mother is" is more common than "me and my mother are". But that's not true, it's the the other way around.
So, for example, saying that A gets 1,500,000 hits and B gets 1,450,000 hits (results on the first page) and concluding that A and B are equally common, might be a big mistake.
That's cool, eh?
![Smile [:)]](/emoticons/emotion-1.gif)