600613 (opens in new tab)

(bit-player.org)

65 pointskrg11y ago19 comments

19 comments

> 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.

ajani11y ago

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.

vtlynch11y ago

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.

1 more reply

arikrak11y ago

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"}!

FreeFull11y ago

Sounds like an odd bug in how Google works.

vitd11y ago

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.)

vog11y ago

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...

bowmessage11y ago

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?!

sssss333311y ago

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

malkia11y ago

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..

pavel_lishin11y ago

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.

ikeboy11y ago

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

guidopallemans11y ago

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

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

moonfern11y ago

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.

alex_duf11y ago

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.

ozh11y ago

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

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