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Searches and Engine Results
A research article confuses the number of results and searches.
Search engines are an important means of using the internet. By typing a query into a search engine, the user gets results. From there, people can find related pages to their search terms.
Between volumes and results
How many times do people search for a term (or group of terms)? This is an important question. Google provides a tool, which produces indices of search terms and topics. This is different to the number of results a search term gives.
A published article in The Journal of General Psychology makes a major error. The methods section states:
To locate the amount of search results for a Google query one can set the date or date range in the advanced settings of one’s browser or by using the following query suffix (“query” after:YEAR-MM-DD before: YEAR-MM-DD).
The article confuses the number of results for the number of searches.
Search query “laid off” resulted in 58.5 million Google searches post-pandemic which was an increase of 69% from 2019.
There is also the issue of exact matches. Search results for ‘laid off’ includes pages where those two words appear — but not in that order. The…
