Google: Clever Cost Cutting
October 18, 2022
Most web searchers do not make it past the first page or two of Google results. But even if one has the patience to go all the way to the end, it seems one can only see a fraction of the results promised at the top of each page. According to a blog post from web scraper SerpApi, “Google’s ‘Millions of Search Results’ Are Not Being Served in the Later Pages Search Results.” Writer Justin O’Hara reports:
“A misconception regarding Google’s search results is that all of the results are being served to the user conducting that particular search. Those 2 billion search results can’t be gotten through Google’s pagination, and it seems that this number is somewhat arbitrary to the search, or commonality of the keyword. I rarely go past the 2nd or 3rd page of Google’s search results for any kind of query anymore, but these rankings of results are big business with Search Engine Optimization. I wanted to do a little case study on the actual amount of searches that get served to users for a couple different searches.”
O’Hara experimented by searching for his company’s name and could see only 146 results out of the 166,000 Google said it found. Repeating the search with omitted results included, as Google offers, garnered only 369 results. But why? Cost cutting? Or perhaps information shaping? We may never know. Not surprisingly, O’Hara emphasizes SerpApi’s Google Search API can scrape the results Google itself does not deign to pass on to users.
Cynthia Murrell, October 18, 2022
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