Simple Google Hack Gives You More
May 23rd, 2007 · by David Bradley
Are you fed up with seeing just ten results on the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) when you’re searching for stuff? What if you could display 20 results? 50? 100? Well, you can!
Does this post sound too much like an ad? Sorry. Not meant to be. Just highlighting a very simple hack that allows you to display any number of search results on a single scrollable page instead of having to repeatedly click the “next” link at the foot of each SERP.
Here is the key “&num=100″
Open Google, type in your keywords, hit the return/enter key and when the results appear, you will see the usual ten. Now, jump to the address bar (Control-L in Firefox), go to the end of the Ggogle search URL that appears there (Control-end in any Windows browser) now type &num=100 and hit return again.
You should now see a single SERP carrying 100 results rather than the paltry default 10. It works for any number 100 or lower, so don’t waste time trying 200, 500, or 1000, it won’t work, it will just give you 100 entries on SERP.
So, why would you want to do this? Well, it saves a lot of time when you’re doing research by reducing the “next” clicks you have to make repeatedly with just 10 results per page. If your search term does not appear in the top 100 results returned it is fairly unlikely to be of interest to a general search query. Also, with a page of 100 results, you can use Control-F to find a specific site, such as sciencetext on that page.
Here’s an example in action.
Search for use GMail as a virtual hard drive with Google. At the time of writing, the Sciencetext post about this subject is not on page one. So, add the &num=100 tag to the end of the search results address, and do a Control-F for “sciencetext”, oh, and there we are, about number 16 in the list. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on which Google Data Center your ISP is connecting to when you hit google.com.
This probably was not the best example to give, as being on page two, I would have got to the sciencetext entry quicker just hitting the “next” link. But, I wouldn’t have known that in advance, the site could have been on page 9! &num=100 would have saved us 8 next clicks to get to it. If each of those takes three seconds or so to scan one page, navigate to the bottom of that page, click next, wait for it to open and scan again, then that’s 24 seconds wasted. How many searches do you do each day? You can see it could begin to add up.
Of course, if you really need to check out the 1000th result, then there are still those “next” links to click, you just won’t have so many to make.
Science News
Join me on StumbleUpon
My Facebook Page
Flickr Photos
My Twitter microblog
Network with me on LinkedIn
My reading list
Sig Figs Calc
Tech Jobs
8 responses so far ↓
mzilikazi // May 23, 2007 at 10:32 pm
I like the Scroogle search plugin. It’s just another search engine in the Search bar but it scrapes google pages. You get no ads and 100 results all in one page. It’s just as easy to install as any other FF plugin.
You’re so silly. Nobody ever looks beyond page 1 or at most page 2 of the search results. Didn’t you know that?
Aw, come on Hsien, when you are doing detailed research sometimes you have to dig right down through page after page to get to the nugget you need.
This is often the case when searching for the origin of a particularly juicy bit of gossip that everyone is talking about.
Likewise, if you are searching for scientific papers in Google Scholar you may need to read everything about the subject not just the page one SERPs.
Point taken for general searches though, most people rarely go past page 1 or 2.
Incidentally, it is possible to set 100 as the default using Google advanced search.
I normally just set the results in Google preferences but this is a good tip for bouncing between a leisurely search and a research related search. I’m aware that the typical person only looks at the first page or two of results but, as David points out, you can find real gold by digging deep. It’s one of the reasons I don’t particularly care for the meta search engines. I find a great deal more by digging deep one search engine at a time.
Paul // Jun 19, 2007 at 12:27 am
Can someone help me? In my Google searches, I need to dig deep through page after page all the way to the end. But Google only displays up to page 100 and not beyond. How can I go past this to page 1000, 10000, etc., and to the end? Thanks!
Paul, I think this is something that Google occasionally experiments with, allowing the display of more results than 100, but at the moment it is not possible.
There are some SEO tools that will find a particular domain within the whole SERPs and display that page rather than you having to click through page after page to find your site for a particular keyword.
If you cannot find your site in the first few pages though, one possibility is that the page is supplemental, sandboxed, or simply not in the results at all.
Nice article. But I thought I might add that you can actually set the number of search results in your preferences (preferences link beside the Search button).
Setting it through the preferences will make it default for every search. Personally I keep it at 30.
Better still if you’re using Firefox as your web browser and have Greasemonkey scripting installed, there’s a neat little script that automatically opens the next SERPs as you scroll. The script is called Pagerization
db
Leave a Comment