As some of my friends may know, I'm not exactly a fan of Google. I like gmail quite a bit, google voice is a really nice service, I use their rss aggregation just for convenience and so far I'm fairly pleased with their music platform but other than that I rarely use them. Hmm... maybe I don't hate them as much as I thought!

Well, I was recently talking to someone about the foundation of google, namely search. I was making the case that with Bing around there is a quite viable alternative. It is pretty rare that I have to go to the next page when I'm searching for something and generally speaking both Bing and Google pull something useful enough for me in the first 10 results. If I have to click next it is because either I need to refine my search terms or because I'm searching for something very specific and I'm not sure how to refine the terms any further.

This brings me to the point of this post. I was watching ESPN this evening and one of the anchors, Mike Greenberg, mentioned that the terms "ndamukong suh dirty player" brought up more than 70k results on Google. As a long time geek this is the first time I can recall hearing someone on TV directly tie the number of supposed results found on Google to something relevant. Really? So it is a popular topic perhaps in light of the Thanksgiving day game but does 70k in and of itself really mean anything at all? How many people will ever look at these 70k results?

Search is something that has interested me for a while so when I got a chance I decided to fire up both Google and Bing to see what I could find. The results surprised me and they might surprise you as well.

Now, it is not groundbreaking to find out that they initially give you a number higher than expected. But that much higher? Really? So I decided to look into some of the deeper results. When I got to about the 20th page I noticed that the number of results changed.

This time I see 72k results, almost what Mike Greenberg mentioned on TV. What I want to know is what happened to the other 100k results? What if I was interested in result # 73k?

So I decided to see what Bing had for this same scenario.

Wow! I expected Bing to be about the same as Google but apparently their search result inflation algorithm is more bloated. Not surprising really since this is Microsoft afterall and they are no strangers to bloat. This is downright shocking though. Could they really have anywhere close to 380k results when Google only has 77k or so? To keep things even I navigated to the 20th page of the Bing results.

Ok, so now we have less results than Google at this point. Almost half as many actually, if the number can be believed to be anywhere close anyway.

So, what have we learned? Nothing really other than ignore the number of results they claim to have found. You probably won't click on the second page anyway so the number is meaningless. If you do have to click the second page you should think about adjusting your search terms.