Not to me. I’ve tried a bunch of times to look for obscure shit I’ve seen before (and know exists) but have bumped up against the limit. This is especially annoying when the thing I’m looking for vaguely sounds like a more popular topic, and so the first 10 pages are just about the more popular version.
The solution to avoid the more popular version as much as possible is to exclude keywords associated with it, and/or to add required keywords associated only with the thing you're looking for. Exact string matches ("go programming language" rather than "go") help too.
Searching by date range doesn’t work either since it brings up current articles as well.
They’re not complaining, they’re advertising their own (paid) service (which serves Google results programatically) while at the same times being able to point to customers why they’re getting fewer results than a regular Google search (they aren’t, because Google’s number doesn’t reflect what you can look at).
But I don't agree that it's "obvious" that "you're not going to be able to browse to page 187,398,384 to get those results. I would argue that a search result is only a search result if you can actually view it. If not, it's just a marketing, or statistics.
Really easy to get clicks (and upvotes on HN apparently) by complaining about literally anything Google related.
Personally I'd prefer something like "Returned top N of 166,000 results" and easy access to those N results (first/best match, last/worst match, paginate left/right)
This is exactly my point. This article spends a thousand words to say "google doesn't actually let you see every result from the billions it claims to have."
Okay cool, I'm not gonna read a billion search results anyways, that's why I ask google about a topic.
The writing is poor, the "findings" mundane, it's a marketing fluff piece that tries to convince you there's a problem and then plug their service as a means to solve it.
The search page for coffee says "Page 1 of about 3,600,000,000 results"
How are we to know that we can't load page 360,000,000? Maybe it's obvious if you're familiar with search engine internals/algorithms, which the vast majority of people won't be.
But it seems obvious that if "coffee" gives 2 billion results that, no, you're not going to be able to browse to page 187,398,384 to get those results. There's no use case for that for any normal consumer (as opposed to competitor, researcher, etc.). If you're capped at browsing the first 10 pages or whatever, that's entirely reasonable.
> A misconception regarding Google’s search results is that all of the results are being served to the user conducting that particular search.
That misconception lies only with the author. Nobody's being "served" 2 billion results, I don't even know what that would mean. The number of results being reported is quite obviously in order to allow users to judge the breadth of search queries. If it says 2 billion, you might want to refine. If it says 15 and they're all useless, go broader.
(It's useful for researching item popularity too, although that's been superseded by Google Trends which is built specifically for that.)