About N results
Below a web search, Neuji prints an estimate of how many results exist in total — "About 12,000,000 results". This number is computed by Neuji, privately, from its own data. It is not returned by any upstream service, and producing it sends nothing about your query anywhere.
Why Neuji computes it
The search provider Neuji draws web results from does not report a total result count — it returns the page of results and nothing more. Most engines show an "about N" figure; to match that without giving anything up, Neuji estimates the total itself, in memory, from Neuji's own frequency corpus: a table of how often words and short phrases occur across the web. From the rarity of your query's terms it works out a plausible total. The query never leaves the process, and nothing is logged.
What the number means, and does not
Read it as a rough order of magnitude, the way the "about N" line on any search engine is meant to be read — a sense of whether a query is broad or narrow, not an exact count. Two properties are worth knowing:
- It is deterministic. The same query yields the same estimate every time. The number does not drift between identical searches.
- It never undercounts what you can see. The estimate is floored by the number of results actually retrieved, so it is always at least as large as the set in front of you, never smaller.
When it is hidden
The estimate appears for web searches only. The image, news, video, and shopping verticals do not show it.
It is also suppressed when a Restrict lens is active. A Restrict lens limits results to a short allow-list of sites, so a web-scale total would be misleading — you are no longer searching the whole web — and Neuji omits the line rather than print a number that does not fit the search.