Is Google a SCAM? When I searched it said "Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query"

Question

Is that why their search works so fast? They aren't really searching the hundreds of billions of web pages that they say they are searching?

Here's what I did:
1) Go to google.com
2) Search for something generic
3) Go to the 2nd or third page, then change the URL to start results from any number greater than 1000.

and I got this message:

"Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query"

Is Google just a big scam??? Are they no better than any other search engine??

Answer 1

Odds are they do some sort of caching. So their average result set may not be over 1000 records because honestly how many times do you look past 1000 websites? But If you follow the proper progression links on the page it should return all the links it found.

Answer 2

Yeah, you found them out. :P

In all seriousness, what Google tries to do is serve relevant results. When your criteria is too general relevancy tends not to matter much. Once you get to a certain point where sites are equally irrelevant, what difference does it make whether or not a search engine displays them to you.

In the original days of the first search engines like Yahoo, results were mostly about cataloging sites. Then sites like Altavista started searching and indexing sites. Google simply came up with an algorithm to grade sites using an algorithm that aside from content, also factors in whether or not other sites link to the site in question.

This algorithm has turned out to be pretty effective although Google and other search engines work on tuning all the time, as other people explore ways to game the search engine and get their sites or the sites of their clients a higher ranking by exploting things they've guessed about how the Google ranking works.

Answer 3

No, not a scam. Google works so quickly because it doesn't handle entire database queries at once. It just shows the first 10, and estimates how many results there are. Then, does the same for the next 10, and so on. I guess it doesn't bother after 1000.

If you want more results, make a more specific search.

Answer 4

No.

The 1000 result has probably got so little to do with your query, it is pointless including it.

I usualy find what im looking for when using a search engine (Y!, Google, Live) with the first 2 pages

Answer 5

Well they always include the most relevant things on the first or second page of results, so I'd say that it is very useful. Also they have many other products besides search: spreasheets, word processors, and email.