8
votes
Adding number of search results found to search results page?
I recently did a search for "Wikipedia" and got quite a few results. I think it would be nice if somewhere it showed how many results were found as I had a search term or two I could've added to narrow things down. Is this something anybody else would find useful?
I'm confused about how seeing the number of search results would help you to narrow things down. Can't you just see that the resulting list of search results from your first attempt is too long, and then type in an additional search term or two for your second attempt?
What difference would it make for you to read "5 results" or "50 results" or "500 results" or "5,000 results" at the top of the list of results? You can see if it's only 5 results, and anything more than about 20 results is just "lots".
Part of this was that I wasn't looking for a specific post, just looking for a general idea. So I wanted to look through more than 5 posts. But longer search results are also paginated and without knowing how many pages there are it's difficult to know if the search should be refined or not.
If the results were 5,000 I'd know that I could make things more specific until I've got into a range I'm comfortable reviewing. It also seems like a fairly easy feature to add.
I'm not saying this feature is not easy to add. I was wondering about the need for it, and the usage of it. Thanks for explaining.