How Frugal is Google?

I bet you didn't know this: Google, which is a play on the word googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, is more synonymous with thousand.

The other day, partly for research and partly for fun, I decided to see how many hits I'd get searching for cake. I wanted to see how irrelevant were the results found on the last page of the search. Would I get porn? Would I get something about soap?

My search for cake yielded about 40,100,000. That's forty million, one hundred thousand, in case you missed the impact.

In order to go to the last page, I had to change the code from the address window. So I plugged in 40000000 in the address window (which looked like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=cake&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&start=40000000&sa=N). I got a wonderful error message: "Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 40000000.)"

What good is knowing that cake appears even one million times, never mind forty, when you're only entitled to a thousand servings? (Then again, a thousand servings of any information, like a thousand servings of cake, might do some serious damage.)

On the last page, which includes results 991-999, I found Easter Cake Decorating Images and Ideas, an article on making Tres Leches Cake, the history of New Orleans Mardi Gras King CAke, and recipes for Red Velvet, Pineapple Upside Down, Jamaican Chocolate, 4th of July, wedding, and Tropical Kumquat cakes and cupcakes, not a single one irrelevant.

Bet you didn't know that.