2.10: 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:
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!
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.
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.
The larger the number of O s 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.
Bonus Search Navigation Tools
Here are a few bonus tools for navigating through search results.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Once past the first results page a left arrow and P revious option appear. Use either of these to navigate to previous search result pages.
Contributors and Attributions
- Identifying Search Results. Authored by : Sherri Pendleton. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution