Google’s misleading numbers

I am amazed at the fact that Google can crunch billions of pages and return your results in fractions of a second. This seems almost impossible, but it does seem to turn up your results. The results are good, by far the best results returned by any other search engine (in terms of relevance). Have you ever wondered what those number shown on the screen are?

Out of curiosity I ran a search query for the term “facebook” which returned 164,000,000 results (0.06 seconds). If you keep running it a couple of times, those figures change. Here’s what I got on a couple of runs:

164,000,000 results (0.06 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.18 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.13 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.09 seconds)
164,000,000 results (0.05 seconds)

None of them seem to take too long and the number of results is consistent (rounded off I’m guessing)

What’s surprising though is if you go through all the results you end up with 54 pages of 10 results each which amounts to 540 results. Well it does give you an option to “repeat the search with the omitted results included”. So I did and I got 100 pages with 10 results per page which makes it 1000 results. Also by including omitted results I get 150,000,000 results (0.22 seconds).

Am I missing something here or should the number of results after including the omissions be more than if I did exclude them? It also seems to take longer to search, which is understandable since people wouldn’t normally venture out after 58 pages of results. In fact, if its not within the first 10 pages (if you are patient), you tend to re-phrase you search query in hopes for more targetted results.

What I’m unable to figure out though are what do those enormous numbers mean if it isn’t returning that much information? My only guess is that it represents the number of times the keyword occurs in all the pages they have indexed (or some union/intersection if multiple keywords exist). To me it sounds misleading to say that there are that many “results” when I can’t actually see them.