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How does Foursquare return venues during search?

Why does a Google search for the word "cat" return 463,000,000 results today, yet using the Google Search tools to create a custom range of anything indexed up to and including today returns 928,000,000 results? Shouldn't these numbers be identical?

  • These results seem to be typical of any word. "Running" returns 1,530,000,000 results when using search tools for anything indexed up to and including today, yet if you search for things indexed "any time" then you end up with 465,000,000. With other words this difference is reversed, where the search tools search retrieves a far lower number rather than a higher number. I'm trying to use search tools to map the increased popularity of a specific term over the years, but it seems that this system is unreliable. Or am I just using it incorrectly?

  • Answer:

    The counts in all search engines are mostly fantasy. See: http://searchengineland.com/why-google-cant-count-results-properly-53559 for some details.

Greg Lindahl at Quora Visit the source

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The thing about those counts of documents are that they are only gross approximations. Google COULD tell you how many documents they have indexed, but not as quickly as that number pops up on the screen. You can prove this to yourself by conducting a more bounded search (one that you can actually count the results) and if it is over several pages you will see that the count does not match what they actually return. Treat those numbers as a very rough approximation.

Jack Dahlgren

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