I think those numbers are way off.

If I search for "the", I get 220,868,020 results from "my favorites". That's impossible.

Looks like a bug in the number of search results. You get different results as you page through the gallery of photos. Sometimes reaching 1.35 Billion.

I did a search on flowers and got a huge number, but as I paged through there were only about 6000 (and the number corrected itself at some point).

Hi Phillip,

** you need to have your language settings set to "English-US" as well to see the results.

Cheers,

joerg.

This reminds me of the Robert Scoble "brrreeeport" test, around a year ago. Scoble made up this word, and asked bloggers to write this word on the blog.

Google consistently over-reported the number of occurrences of the word, at one point saying that there were over 250,000 web pages containing that word. And that was a mere week or two after Scoble made the word up, a mere week or two after Google showed zero web pages with the word.

See also this post:

http://scobleizer.com/2006/02/08/why-do-search-engines-lie/

In March, I asked a Googler about this, and his response was that it doesn't matter what the numbers are, since no one really looks at or uses those numbers anyway. My followup question was: why even bother showing the numbers, if they're both wrong, and unused. He did not have an answer.

I blogged about this on the day that the search first appeared.

See:
http://www.zmarties.com/picasa/blog/2007/03/first-picasaweb-search-bug.html

At that time, as the numbers were rapidly changing for many searches (as people elected to include their results), there seemed to be a threshold of around 20000 – below that the numbers were fairly accurate, but as the true number of results climbed above that, the reported number went crazy.