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Most numbers of this magnitude garner a few thousand hits on Google, but 25898913 gets 29,500,000.

If you actually click through the results, on pages 1-34 you get "Page 34 of about 24,900,000 results (0.34 seconds) ", but on page 35 you discover that there are only actually 341 results.

I've found this to be consistent behaviour with Google. The number of search results tend to be totally unreliable. I don't know if they use the same search algorithm for gmail, but the same problem occurs there as well. Initially it might say 1-50 of 100 results, go to the second page and suddenly it's 50-100 of 2000. And on the next page 100-150 of "many".

Google search-hit count has never been fully accurate - I say this empirically from use over the years, and having tried to use the number of hits in some random experiment I can no longer remember.

Google acknowledges this: https://support.google.com/gsa/answer/2672285?hl=en

I remember seeing a more in depth article about this but cant find it at the moment.

So apparently it is possible to get an accurate result count (for up to 1 million results) using "rc = 1"? Does anyone have an examples illustrating this behavior (I can't seem to contrive one where it makes a difference)?

I suspect rc=1 applies to enterprise search.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

It's a bit ridiculous how Google shows those numbers on top and people constantly quote there are X results for Y when the real results are always far off from that. There are 382,000 results for {number of "google results"}!

Sounds like an odd bug in how Google works.

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