>For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might not have the

>For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might not have the word but are deemed related to it. >Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the same number, even though that number should drop. As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate count. I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]: >From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team): >"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things" [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-count-and-estimate-the-number-of-a-search-results* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-c... Edit:formatting