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Google search mystery

3 points by siliconviking ↗ HN
Can someone explain to me why searching for the phrase "this is great" on Google returns 2.7 billion page results whereas searching for just "is great" returns 230 million? Shouldn't the "is great" search return more results than "this is great"?

Bing results seem more consistent with expectations: "this is great" returned 12 million results and "is great" returned 53 million results (on a side note, I'm a little surprised by how much less content Bing seems to have indexed vs. Google).

8 comments

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OGinparadise
numbers don't mean much once in the millions is my guess.
L4mppu
Maybe it is because with 'this is great' it searches with 'this is', 'is great' and 'this is great'.

I might be wrong but that's my guess. Why won't you try searching with "'this is great'" and include ' and ' so it srarches only sites that has 'this is great' in it.

siliconviking
Good suggestion - but I did the searches with quotes originally, so I don't think that's the case...
mikecane
"this is great" can be an entire sentence. "is great" could be preceded by any number of other words: "Hacker News is great," "The iPod is great," etc.

I've long ago given up trying to make sense of what the hell Google has done to search. Both Google Books and YouTube search are exercises in letting yourself be abused. None of this is the Google that made everyone flock to Google when it was unknown.

EDIT for a typo.

jfoster
Something I have started to find extremely annoying is the way Google now discards some of your keywords if they think they have a strong match for your other keywords. Synonyms I'm fine with, but does anyone know how to make Google match all of the keywords?

Example is "fab lab Sydney" bringing back the fab lab Wikipedia page, which doesn't have "Sydney" (or a synonym) on it.

Sargis
Try using the Verbatim search option. You can find it by clicking the Search Tools menu.
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frew
Returning accurate search result counts (i.e. "give me an exhaustive list of all pages that match this query") is at cross purposes to the main search problem (i.e. "give me the best ten pages for this query"). For the former, you want to be exhaustive, for the latter, you want to cut every corner you can to get results back as quickly as possible. Google optimizes for the latter at the expense of the former. Basically, don't put too much stock in any of the numbers you get back from Google.