In other words, the product is shitty because no-one at the company really cares about it - because of course, that “product” is just a vehicle for a big ad company. On top of that, there’s no meaningful competition. Hopefully we’ll get some DoJ action on this at some point.
I'd highly recommend this exercise for everyone who complains that there's no competition for Google, because a.) you're actually trying the competition and b.) you might realize how much Google does for you, and how far ahead they are against the competition. Who knows, you might even find a better search engine, and then next time you can come make recommendations for other HNers.
Most daily usage now I use Bing for the rewards points, and it’s approximately as good as current Google. Never have I failed to find something with Bing I then found with Google, despite it being a regular occurrence.
Yes, if only one page is shown, it’s accurate. I picked that (unquoted, sorry) phrase because it resulted in two results pages for me, showing a worse case scenario. With your settings, it would require a term with > 100 results to see the fiction.
I actually do assume it’s intentional, because
1. It’s predominant, at the top left of the page
2. I assume your UI team is competent and cares about every pixel shown on the screen, especially predominantly placed ones
3. it’s great marketing
4. It’s absurdly incorrect. 10x could be ubderstandable. It’s off by nearly 27,000x error here.
I can guarantee you that it's not intentional. It was definitely easier to estimate in the past, when a single query was fired on a single corpus for a given user input, but modern web search is vastly more complicated than this.
What I get for: "starfish buttercup pickle mouse"
is exactly one result [About 1 results (0.32 seconds)], which is your YC post.
Removing the quotes gives me [About 34 results (0.63 seconds)].
The difference is that I have setup Google to show 100 results per page by default. I believe that this allows the (very approximate) results estimation algorithm to be more accurate. When I switch to 10 results, I get [About 591,000 results (0.53 seconds)]. Feel free to verify that this is the case for you as well.
There is no foul play here. I work at search serving, I've seen that algorithm. My personal opinion is that nobody cared to improve it because almost nobody (modulo YC crowd) cares.