Does that mean you don't use google search? Its been back a long time.

What do you prefer for search if not?

Google employees don't know what's going about top-level policies unlike a few government affiliated managers like Dean or Page (source: google images). It's possible that Google employees don't see the same content as outsiders. Literally CCP vibes, or Plato's Cavern.

Every Google engineer can see the code that performs this calculation. Google engineers have demonstrated that we are very vocal when we smell foul play.

The government doesn't have backdoors in Google source codes? or Google engineers are patriotic?

What do you mean by "source: google images"?

I’ve used Google for decades and I’ve never paid any attention to this. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was there or not without looking.

I think a better question is why it was ever there in the first place if the numbers are so extraordinarily inaccurate.

Based on the explanation above, it sounds like the big number is the "real number" and then they throw away everything except the first couple results when they're put in the cache. Presumably the number of results is calculated before this caching and nobody cares enough to fix it.

Yeah, so basically you just can't actually get millions of results.

But others have pointed out that those index numbers don't resolve rationally to results.

It seems the index number is a different match than what they choose to show.

Sure, I understand where the number comes from, but I have trouble understanding why someone would program that calculation, see that the number is not actually what a user would experience, and say "okay cool let's put that on the page". It seems hard to imagine any possible motivation other than being purposely misleading, in which case the answer the question "why was it put back?" presumably would have the same answer.

If the number is in the billions you're not going to experience each of those websites anyway - you'd run out of time in your lifetime.

I suspect (it was introduced before I started, and re-introduced after I left) that it's there to remind users of the work that software performs on their behalf, much like how TurboTax says "$X in taxes saved" or Brave says "9 hours saved blocking ads" or your brokerage says "Total profit: $X". Users tend to forget this, and just assume that they're entitled to the world where the product exists.

That presumably depends on when the caching was put in place.

If the number was in the thousands in the late-90s, you could probably get through all of the sites.

If the caching was put in later, say, the early 2000s when google started getting really big, the number might just keep growing until it eventually looks ridiculous.

I've never worked at google, but I've seen a few systems that broke in weirder ways when nobody bothered to maintain them after they had outlived their usefulness.

You really think a company would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?