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Unless you paged thru these and manually counted yourself, do not trust Google’s number of returned results. It’s effectively a random number generator.

Source: I’ve worked for Google.

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Surely it's closer to an estimate than purely random?

Do not use it for any comparisons. It is not what you think it is. It's largely there to impress you with how big Google is, and at this point, more historical inertia than anything else.

Here's a bit of outside analysis that's fun to read: https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/04/trochee-chart/

Of course it is not very rigorous but those results seem to indicate a pattern to the contrary.

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