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May 06, 2005
What's the most popular number (under 976)?
I had never messed around with the Google Web APIs before so I figured I'd download them and give them a try. As a quick test, I queried each number between 0 and 976 (I tried for 1000 but my program timed out) to see which numbers were the most popular.
You can download the Java code here and you can see the list of results here. It took a few seconds for each query, so the whole program took well over an hour to run.
It looks like the most popular number was 1 with 340,000,000 results and the least popular number was 958 with 645,000 results. The only thing I am confused about is that the number of results I got using the API was different than the number of results Google's website gives. For example, when I searched for 1, the API told me there were about 340,000,000 results, but when I searched Google's Website, I was told there were about 1,490,000,000 results. I am sure there is a good reason for the difference, but I am just not sure what it is (nor have I bothered to research it)... If anyone knows the answer, please let me know.
Some other popular numbers were: 1 2 4 3 5 8 10 7 12 306 25 11 9
Some other unpopular numbers were: 958 959 884 948 897 969
By the way, sign up here to get your own Client Key, or do a search for "String clientKey =" to find some random ones people have accidentally posted on the web. You need a Client Key in order to submit your own queries to Google via the API.
Posted by Chuck at May 6, 2005 04:39 PM
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Comments
Hi Chuck,
Looks like others on the Google API group have been having the same problem. Since I was writing a similar program explicitly to get Google hit counts, I guess I have to either start scraping or figure out the number of pages the API actually has access to.
Link:
M
Posted by: Michael Saji at May 8, 2005 09:51 PM
You're limited to 1000 queries a day for your Google API key, so I guess that's why your program timed out at 976...
I believe number 1000 would have been another popular contestant.
Posted by: Antoine at June 1, 2005 02:50 PM