Google’s “million’s of search results” are not being served
I was curious, so I tried to do this with GitHub search.<p>The search “Golang” returns 225k+ repositories. Each page of results has 10 repositories. I queried page 1000 to see the 10001st-10010th results and got a 404.<p>I searched Wikipedia (using its own search page) for “America” and was told there were 1.9M results. I requested the 10001st result and it failed with this message:<p>“An error has occurred while searching: Could not retrieve results. Up to 10000 search results are supported, but results starting at 10000 were requested.”<p>There was an HN thread along these lines about web search somewhat recently, with people making confident accusations about false advertising etc.<p>But it really seems that everyone does this. I don’t know, maybe it’s still wrong or misleading.<p>But personally I’m ok knowing “there are X hits and we will serve you some of them”.<p>EDIT: I just searched the Library of Congress for “god” and was told I was viewing results 1-25 of 324,782. Sure enough when I asked for page 10,000 I was rebuffed. I really don’t think this is a Google thing