It's not a lie. "There are eleventy badillion results" is a true statement, not a promise to show you all of them.

By that same logic, businesses can advertise "sale, many items 90% off" but when you show up, nothing is 90% off, and you could argue that the business only claimed that the items existed, they never said they would actually sell it to you.

Except that the word "sale" literally means that you can buy something.

You can certainly buy things at this store, and there are certainly things for sale at 90% off. The things that are 90% off are at other stores, though, and this store can't be blamed for your assumptions.

Similarly I think most would expect result to imply retrievability.

How so? It makes perfect sense to say "there are 1 million results but you can only access 1,000 of them" but it's complete nonsense to say "we are selling 1 million items but we are only selling 1,000 of them."

> It makes perfect sense to say "there are 1 million results but you can only access 1,000 of them"

Except that's _not_ what Google is saying. Google is saying there are 1 million results and won't tell you that you can only access the first N.

Where do you see Google's implied or explicit promise to provide with you every result they've found?

Imagine you search Amazon for “blue baseball cap”, they say they found 1,234 items and then you could only see and purchase 10… Why say you have 10,000,000 search results if you only intend to show 100? What’s the use of the number 10,000,000? To inspire a sense of awe in the user, that you then cannot make good on? To inform the user on some technicality? To me this feels like Google is selling a car that can technically drive 250 km/h but is limited at 150 km/h, and then advertising it as “Do you love driving 250 km/h? Then buy the Google car!”

Actually, if the number actually meant something I would find it very useful.

If google said there were actually just 1234 results for my search, my attitude towards checking things much further down the list would be quite different than if it said there are 123,456,789 results. With a number like that, I know that "deep searching" is likely to be fruitless, which is paradoxical but so is life.

The problem is that I'm not convinced that the result count actually means what we generally think it does.

> Where do you see Google's implied promise to provide with you every result

The implied promise is the button that says "Search".

1. It's a search engine. Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.

2. Searching with other tools works. Use `grep` or your computer's local search feature and it will give you all of the results.

3. If I go through my old email, I can download literally every email. I can search literally every email, for hundreds of thousands of email.

> Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.

True. But that's not the question, is it? The question is whether only giving you the "first" N of the results makes it useless, or something else...

Nobody, I think, is contesting, that search in some contexts is always expected to provide you with access to everything that is found. The issue is whether that can be expected to apply to a case where 10M results are found, and if not, what the cutoff point ought to be ...

> > > Where do you see Google's implied promise to provide with you every result

> > The implied promise is the button that says "Search".

> True. But that's not the question, is it?

You wanna stop moving the goalposts?

I will if you will. You said:

> Searching is useless if it doesn't provide results.

but nobody has suggested that Google doesn't provide any results.

would you say it's at least misleading to say that there are 10 billion results? If not, how far would it have to go before you would consider it misleading?

i would call it a tease. i don't (currently) have any particular reason to disbelieve the result count. but under some circumstances i'd be pissed that google would not show me more than 500.

aha! Sale means SOMEONE can buy something. Not necessarily you! Under the hood, it means that only relatives of the store owner can actually purchase it. Gotcha! You shoulda read the fine print more closely!

We wouldn't tolerate a business advertising "up to 90% off" if there doesn't exist at least one item that is 90% off. Businesses can't point to an item that is 30% off and claim that 30% off is a subset of 90% off.

I'd be surprised if this didn't actually happen.

There are laws (at least in the US) about advertising sales that prevent it from happening.

When I search for "How do elephants know what time it is", and Google tells me there are "Ungefähr 429.000.000 Ergebnisse" (about 429 million results), what is Google actually telling me?

There are 429,000,000 pages that are related to my search? There are 4.29x10^8 pages that have, what, one or more of those words on them?

Seems more like a lie than like the truth.

In the 53 mins since you checked, google has apparently found another 4.3M results for this query :)

How is this not a modern flavor of bait and switch?

You could test that hypothesis by publishing some long hash on several hundred pages, then search for it.

I believe you can no longer google hash values? It used to work years ago but I just searched for "6867d9167683fb8f42558a81ad107f5b" and got zero results. That is the MD5 hash for "asd3" and this is short enough that it should be on one of those MD5 web pages...

Update: Wow, zero results for "2585ecdb9a753ca54a96fae62bfda433", the MD5 hash of "r68". They must be filtering them out on purpose.

Update 2: Googling "2585ecdb9a753ca54a96fae62bfda433" now turns up this exact 10 minute old comment, so your approach might work if the hash is embedded within "real" content.