Identifying Search Results

Learning Objectives

  • Identify number of results from each search.

Number of Search Results

In the previous section, you learned how to conduct a web search in a search engine. How do you know how many results from a search you received? Let’s go take a look.

First, open the Chrome browser; make sure you use the Google search box and type in a search for accounting terminology. The results will look similar to this page:

A Google search has been entered for accounting terminology.

Look just above the definition box to see a large number: 32,800,000. This is the total number of accessible webpages and images about accounting terminology. It also took the search engine only 0.37 seconds to find all of this information. Amazing!A Google search has been entered for accounting terminology. A green box is highlighting that about 32,800,000 results were found in 0.37 seconds.

Change the search key words just a bit to see how the number of results changes. Type in accounting terms and see how many results are displayed.

A Google search has been entered for accounting terms. A green box highlights that 247,000,000 results have been found in only 0.50 seconds.

The small change in keywords decreased the results to 247,000,000. Any keyword search conducted will return a number of results which you can see displayed like these examples. Often when there are so many search results it may become more difficult to conduct effective research on a topic. There are ways to narrow down the results and conduct a more focused search which we will go over a little later. Before we leave this subject however, there is one more way in Google search to visually see the size of the search results. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results page.

A Google search has been entered for accounting terms, a green box shows how many different pages of results can be displayed.

The larger the number of Os in the Google logo, the more results from the search you just created.

Now you know how to discover the number of your search results. This number changes for each search result. Have some fun and play around with searches to see the numbers change.

Practice Question

 

Practice Question

 

Bonus Search Navigation Tools

Here are a few bonus tools for navigating through search results.The Google logo is displayed at the bottom of a search results page. There are four green numbers highlighting different options. The first number represents all of the different search pages that are available. The second number shows where the arrow to go to the next page is. The third number shows where the next button can be located and the fourth shows how to access the previous page.

  1. Under the Google logo there are numbers. If the number 3 is selected, the third search result page will be displayed. If the number 6, then the sixth search result page is displayed, and so on.
  2. Selecting the right arrow button takes the browser window to the very next search result page (page 2) and continues to go page by page (3, 4, 5, etc.) as long as you click the arrow button.
  3. Clicking on the Next word navigates the browser window to the very next search result page (page 2) and continues to go page by page (3, 4, 5, etc.) as long as you click the arrow button.
  4. Once past the first results page a left arrow and Previous option appear. Use either of these to navigate to previous search result pages.