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.