I'm one of those inquisitive people who likes to ask potentially
worthless questions.  I was wondering if it's possible to get more
then 3,260,000,000 search results.

--Patrician

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Clarification of Question by patrician-ga on 09 May 2003 13:58 PDT

Search results on Google.com only of course

Hi Patrician,
 
Thanks for your interesting question. First a quick disclaimer: Google
Answer Researchers are not employed by Google, so we don't have any
inside knowledge of the company, beyond what is publicly available
about it.
 
To answer your question, no, it would not be possible to get more than
3,260,000,000 search results. I assume this number you are referring
to is the number of web pages indexed by Google (the actual number is
3,083,324,652, as of today, according to ://www.google.com).
However, it is not even possible to come close to that number.
 
Google does not allow to perform a "blank" search, i.e. searching
without a search term entered. Hence, any search for anything (even
something as generic as "www" or even a single letter) will exclude
some sites. Searching for "www", for example, results in 965 million
hits:
://www.google.com/search?q=www Searching for "w" alone
incidentally results only in 173 million hits.
 
I hope this answers your question. Please let me know (by means of
posting a "clarification request") if you need any more information.
 
Best wishes,
gwagner-ga

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Clarification of Answer by gwagner-ga on 09 May 2003 16:33 PDT

Never mind. Looks like it is possible. aceresearcher-ga got
3,380,000,000 results searching for "the":
://www.google.com/search?q=the

(Please see his comment below.)

So I guess the answer now is a resounding Yes! Don't ask me why, since
there are less pages than that in the entire index at the moment, but
apparently it is possible.

gwagner-ga

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Clarification of Answer by gwagner-ga on 09 May 2003 17:00 PDT

Yet more pages... Searching for "the" (same search as before) now
results in 3,430,000,000 pages found.

gwagner-ga

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Clarification of Answer by gwagner-ga on 11 May 2003 00:57 PDT

And by now it is 3,460,000,000 results for
://www.google.com/search?q=the. Seems like the total web page
number of 3,083,324,652 is either out-of-date or 3,460,000,000 is
indeed only a rough estimate, as Google claims in its search results
by saying "about 3,460,000,000 results."

gwagner-ga

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Clarification of Answer by gwagner-ga on 14 May 2003 13:42 PDT

And here we go again. Official word from Google after emailing them on
why these numbers differ:

"The search results that you get are gross estimates which is why this
occurs. As you can see they can be off my a large number.

Regards,
The Google Team"

It was a good answer, once i finished reading all the clarifications anyways.

It is possible - just wait a few years until the index has grown some
more!

However, at present, 3 billion is the most you can get - and anyway,
only the first 1000 results are actually viewable...

I got 3,380,000,000:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22the%22&btnG=Google+Search

Yah, I got that # of search results by searching for the word 'the' as well.

Thanks for the information.

Ok, i did it myself.  If you change the number of displayed search
results to 100, instead of 10 results, then the number increases to
3,730,000,000 results.