My search for "the" returns 8,630,000,000 results at 12:17 GMT

Same here, and the index page still only says 8,168,684,336... something is going on here.

I just got 9,350,000,000 on www.google.co.uk at 14:37 in the UK!

strange, surely not all of those 8 billion+ pages are in english therefore why would they all have "the" in them?

searching for "the OR -the" without the quotes return
9,580,000,000

google.com/search?q=*+*

gives 11,180,000,000 pages now

I looked it up and I got 8,630,000,000.
Here see for yourself.
google.com/search?hl=en&q= ...