How does Google estimate the number of results for a query?
When and why do you get that message at the bottom of SERPs, that tells you to click upon it to see more results?
How does a standard index, cache, and extended index work together to provide results to a searcher?
I’ve walked through, and summarized, the processes described in a couple of Google patents to see how and when expanded database results might appear with standard index results.
2 Comments
When and why do you get that message at the bottom of SERPs, that tells you to click upon it to see more results?
How does a standard index, cache, and extended index work together to provide results to a searcher?
I’ve walked through, and summarized, the processes described in a couple of Google patents to see how and when expanded database results might appear with standard index results.
2 Comments
Comments
Wow, great dissection, Bill. This is the money line to me: "Whether the amortized cost of performing the extended search is small, comparing the cost of performing the search to the quality of search results" When’s Google going to hit those supplementals (at least with the old system). Whenever it was cheap enough.
Thanks, Danny. You never quite know, when you start to dissect something like this, what you might uncover. When I first read through these patents, that line really didn’t stand out much. As I shaved them down to fewer words, that section on the different signals that might indicate whether a search of the extended database started standing out. The cost/benefit analysis in the decision to show those; considering value to the searcher, quality of results, and cost to the search engine is intersting. It tells us that there is an economic value involved in the steps that the search engine attempts to balance - and that they are thinking about those aspects when showing search results. The same kind of thinking is probably going on when considering if it is a good idea to show images in a universal search, even though they consume more bandwidth, or live videos.