Yes I say GFS because that is the core of why it is this way. From search to reader to gmail etc. All google data operates this way because of the architecture.

It is all in 1000 buckets. Ever gone beyond page 100 in google results? You can't. Even though there are millions of results you can only get to page 99 at 10 results per page because it too is built on GFS.

You are correct: http://www.google.com/search?q=blue&start=1000

> Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 1000.)

Results 811 - 817 of about 687,000,000 for test [definition]. (2.19 seconds) after seeing this, I doubt whether 687,000,000 is correct or not..

Term counting is the hello world of map-reduce examples, so while that number is obviously not exact (exactly 687 million?), it's reasonably accurate, considering the actual use of the count, which is more useless the bigger it is. No one created the opposite of Google Whack, finding the terms that yielded the most results; that's largely uninteresting when the counts are in the hundreds of millions range.

Found this out working at a Web Consultant when working with a google appliance. Specifically this page: http://bidmc.org/Search.aspx