> Most numbers of this magnitude garner a few thousand hits on Google, but 25898913 gets 29,500,000.

If you actually click through the results, on pages 1-34 you get "Page 34 of about 24,900,000 results (0.34 seconds) ", but on page 35 you discover that there are only actually 341 results.

I've found this to be consistent behaviour with Google. The number of search results tend to be totally unreliable. I don't know if they use the same search algorithm for gmail, but the same problem occurs there as well. Initially it might say 1-50 of 100 results, go to the second page and suddenly it's 50-100 of 2000. And on the next page 100-150 of "many".

Google search-hit count has never been fully accurate - I say this empirically from use over the years, and having tried to use the number of hits in some random experiment I can no longer remember.

Google acknowledges this: https://support.google.com/gsa/answer/2672285?hl=en

I remember seeing a more in depth article about this but cant find it at the moment.

So apparently it is possible to get an accurate result count (for up to 1 million results) using "rc = 1"? Does anyone have an examples illustrating this behavior (I can't seem to contrive one where it makes a difference)?

I suspect rc=1 applies to enterprise search.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

It's a bit ridiculous how Google shows those numbers on top and people constantly quote there are X results for Y when the real results are always far off from that. There are 382,000 results for {number of "google results"}!

Sounds like an odd bug in how Google works.

It would be nice to change the title to something coherent and useful, like, "Search queries containing only numbers," or something of that sort. As such, there's not a lot of incentive to click on "600613". (Yeah, I did it, mostly just to make this post coherent.)

Well, I was expecting something about the "Google projection" for maps, unofficially noted as the slightly different EPSG:900913 [1] until finally standardized as EPSG:3857 [2].

[1] http://crschmidt.net/blog/archives/243/google-projection-900...

[2] http://www.epsg-registry.org/report.htm?type=selection&entit...

In response to the trivia question: I'm assuming that it's impossible to find some N wit fewer than 10 digits. In all of my attempts I've received results relating to phone number reverse-lookup sites.

There also seems to be this website which exists just to generate a page full of numbers with any given prefix (defined in the URL):

http://www.qzonecom.com/mobile/maanshan_511556.html

Why?!

That's my favorite thing about the internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cghg-QyTP_M No reason

A new type of business: find a number that's not yet in google/bing/etc. - embded it in your text, and then track who's copied you verbatim - some kind of tracking I guess..

10,041,295,923 now returns exactly one result - the author's page, just as he theorized.

I wonder if it'll return two results soon.

https://archive.today/j8KXp Now it does!

website is under a heavy load, here is the cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MvuGGDF...

The about "number" results should give an idea but it might not be accurate, tells google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ix3mHeL7hg

Anyway you only get the first 1000 results of your googling.

I think it's a matter of scale. The scale of the human race gives us a range of number that are humanly comprehensible. Their distribution diminishes as they make less and less sense to our scale.

That is pretty much the kind of posts I come to HN for. Thanks for the read :)