[ajani]

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.

[vtlynch]

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.

[Chinjut]

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)?

[ajani]

I suspect rc=1 applies to enterprise search.

[Chinjut]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!