Ask HN: Why Google stops printing results after page #1,000

14 points

10 years ago

For a "hello world" query on Google without filtering [1] I get around 60,300,000 results with 10 entries per page. Logic tells me that there is a total of 6,030,000 pages. Google allows to pass an additional parameter "start" with a numeric value to modify the page that I want to see, where page 10 corresponds to start 90, page 20 to start 190, and so on as seen in this table:

    Page | Start | (Page - 1) * Max
    -----|-------|-----------------
      10 |   90  | (  10 - 1) * 10
      20 |  190  | (  20 - 1) * 10
      30 |  290  | (  30 - 1) * 10
      40 |  390  | (  40 - 1) * 10
      50 |  490  | (  50 - 1) * 10
      60 |  590  | (  60 - 1) * 10
      70 |  690  | (  70 - 1) * 10
      80 |  790  | (  80 - 1) * 10
      90 |  890  | (  90 - 1) * 10
     100 |  990  | ( 100 - 1) * 10

This means that going to "start=990" should return a set of 10 results from page #100 [2]. However, it returns an error message saying "Your search - hello world - did not match any documents." and the pagination ends at page #77 with a link pointing to "start=759". If you go to this page the pagination will stop showing the "next" button, but the subtitle still states that there are "60,300,000 results".

Skipping the joke of "no one goes past page #2 in Google" what is your theory about the missing pagination buttons? Why do they not allow the inspection of the results past 1,000 [3]? — In this case Google shows this message: "Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 1000.)" Why not simply print "More than 770 results" considering that 77 is the last page in the pagination that you can inspect, at least with the "hello world" query.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+world&filter=0

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+world&filter=0&start=990

[3] https://www.google.com/search?filter=0&q=hello+world&start=1000

8 comments

Page | Start | (Page - 1) * Max -----|-------|----------------- 10 | 90 | ( 10 - 1) * 10 20 | 190 | ( 20 - 1) * 10 30 | 290 | ( 30 - 1) * 10 40 | 390 | ( 40 - 1) * 10 50 | 490 | ( 50 - 1) * 10 60 | 590 | ( 60 - 1) * 10 70 | 690 | ( 70 - 1) * 10 80 | 790 | ( 80 - 1) * 10 90 | 890 | ( 90 - 1) * 10 100 | 990 | ( 100 - 1) * 10