For instance, running the query:
free online revenue growth modeling tool
says "About 5,970,000 results (0.70 seconds)".
Clicking into the result pages though, there are no more links when paging 100 results at a time, and you end up with this on the third page: "Page 3 of about 236 results (0.65 seconds)".
I looked into it a bit but didn't see any info on it. Curious if anyone here knows. Thanks!
Edit: based on this analysis, it seems the distributed systems implementation is part of it, and user behavior is another part of it https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-only-return-50-pages-of-10-results-when-it-claims-that-there-are-560-000-results