How does Google count and estimate the number of a search results?

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jozi picture jozi · Dec 9, 2010 · Viewed 11.4k times · Source

How does Google count and estimate the number of a search results? For example when I search "stackoverflow," it counts 2,910,000 results.

Answer

Mark Mayo picture Mark Mayo · Dec 9, 2010

Probably the most definitive article on this:

http://searchengineland.com/why-google-cant-count-results-properly-53559

as it's interesting to note that taking stuff out can actually sometimes give more results(!!).

From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team):

"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things"

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