Quoting Google 1

[Dimandja]

In another thread here, there are various statistics being splashed on posts about how many pages contain a given word, for example.

Well, there may be a problem with the figures given by Google as in:

"anticlimatic" ==> 11,600 hits.
"anticlimactic" ==> 94,800 hits.


I too got "Results 1 - 10 of about 11,600 for anticlimatic ". But, there was no 11,600th result! In fact, the last result for that 'word' is result number 821, and 807 for "anticlimactic".

I clicked on 'Next', and got an inspiring URL:
[ignore]

http://www.google.com/search?q=anticlimatic+&hl=en&lr=&

[/ignore]start=10[ignore]&sa=N
[/ignore]
I figured, if I replace that 'start=10' with 'start=11600', I would get to approximately the last page of results, right? Far from it; after a manual binary search, 'start=900' got me to the last page.

This shows me that these 'hits statistics' are misleading at best. In our case (thread1256-955779), our conclusions could use some revising.

 

[strongm]

No, they do not need revising

1) Google never returns more than 1000 results in a single query (even if there are more than 1000 hits that it knows about)

"Ah," you say, "but the query I mention for anticlimatic only gives 821 result, not 1000 as you claim. What about that then?"

Well:

2) Some results in an intial query generally 'hidden' because of their similarity to results already present. You have to go to the last page and click the "Repeat the search with omitted results" link (or just add &filter=0 to the end of your qury URL). Bingo. 1000 results.

 

[Dimandja]

Great, strongm! I did see that little advisory about displaying "similar" results... Thanks!