bcc1234 - 10:43 pm on Jan 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

For one thing, in any ordered dataset - if you want to get the N-th element, the system has to go through N-1 elements in order to even figure out that N-th element is in fact the N-th.

In other words, Google's software has to go through 10M records every time you click refresh on the page that would display 10,000,000-10,000,010th results.

That's just one "final" step that is required after all index has been searched and the pages were ordered (by relevance or anything else for that matter). And this thing alone would consume all google's resources.

[edited by: bcc1234 at 10:45 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2003]