Google sometimes lies

The other day my friend, Mrs Malaprop, told me that she had been reading a really interesting article about the problem of tintinitis. She told me some more about the article, which was interesting, and then she used the word again.

"Tintinitis," she said.

I stopped her.

"Don't you mean tinnitis?" I asked.

"What did I say?" she asked.

"You said tintinitis," I said.

"Did I?" she laughed. "Maybe that's the problem where your hair goes into a little curl..."

A couple of days later I met another two friends, and I told them about this.

"Mrs Malaprop told me she'd been reading an article about tintinitis," I said.

They stared at me, waiting for the rest of the story.

"Um ... TINTINITIS," I said.

"Yes?" they said.

"It's TINNITUS," I said. "Tintin is that little guy with the hair."

"But isn't it either?" said one of my friends. "I'm sure I've heard tintinitis, too."

"No," I said, suddenly feeling a little uncertain. "It's tinnitus."

When I got home I looked it up, just to make sure. In all the dictionaries I checked, there was no tintinitus, tinntinitus or tintinitis, but there was tinnitus. Whew!

When I Googled it, however, I discovered that half the world seems to be calling it tintinitus - until I went to the last page of results, where I discovered that it was actually only a few hundred people.

Yes, that's right. Google LIES! Try it and you'll see. A search on tintinitus tells you there are 5,190,000 results (and suggests the correct spelling of tinnitus), but if you click through to the last page of the search (page 34), suddenly you are told that this is the last of 331 results.

So ... what were the other 5,189,669 results, then?

How strange.