[partomniscient]

My guess they got so many performance gains by conceding a bit of data integrity or search accuracy or replication accuracy or something. Not sure whether it was accidental or on purpose but it seems a persistent behaviour.

Running the same very low result count returning search queries in other parts of googles data sprawl sometimes returns different sized outputs. There's more than one reason they stopped telling you how many search results there were, my guess is consistent inconsistencies is another.