26 January 2014

Google Hides Too Many Search Results



This is a strange bug. For many navigational queries, Google only returns about 100 search results and shows a message like this: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 117 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." If you click the link, you'll be sent back to the first page of results and you'll be able to see more than 100 results (but not 1000). You can also add "&filter=0" to the search URL.






While the duplicate filter is not new, it was used to hide results that were redundant (for example: the same press release published by multiple sites). It's hard to believe that Google can't find more than 117 relevant results for [Google], 120 results for [Facebook] or 75 results for [Yahoo].






When you search for [Yahoo], Google returns a lot of results from yahoo.com and Google's duplication filter stops showing results because they appear to be redundant. There's a conflict between two opposite principles: showing diverse results and showing many results from the most relevant sites.



Here's a page of almost identical search results that probably triggered the filter:






Another issue is that there are many spam pages, irellevant results and pages in foreign languages. Here are some examples for [Amazon]:









Google needs to fix this bug and show more diverse results.



{ Thanks, Joren. }

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