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Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen
Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen

Reputation: 792

Accurate number of results in Google search

A Google search for "micrometeorite" (a random word) returns this:

About 86,400 results.

How do I get an accurate count? I tried using the rc parameter like this:

https://www.google.com/?q=micrometeorite&rc=1

but it does not seem to work.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1151

Answers (1)

Dan
Dan

Reputation: 619

Google--and any rational search engine--fudge the numbers, estimating how many results there are. It doesn't need to be perfect for a search engine. In fact, for them to actually enumerate the number of results would be slow and quite absurd, since most users don't leave the first page or look at the number of results.

I'm not sure what you intend to do with these statistics, but as a linguist, I would advise against using search result counts for anything except knowing how many pages of results you're likely to click through. They do a lot of stuff under the hood that isn't publicly known. The same goes for how, precisely, they index the web. The general stuff is known, but the nitty-gritty of how the counts are derived is not know. As a result of this, the numbers lack context--what pages they come from, n counts out of how many sites exactly, etc.

Instead, I recommend looking at a specific corpus or corpora. There are corpora out there--COCA and UKWAC come to mind as being maximally general--that are ready for research purposes. You could also use Wikipedia as a corpus too, if it suits your needs.

Upvotes: 1

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