Results count inaccurate?

[MtnRunner]

It seems that recently the results count for phrase match terms (e.g. "Results 1-10 of ### for blue widgets") is broken.

Upon initial search it will might show anything from "1-10 of" 2000 to 40000, but then clicking deeper into results pages invariably changes it to something like "80-87 of 87".

It seems to be the same in multiple keyword tools as well, where they will return the higher (inflated?) number. I'm looking mostly at long tail local niche KWs where the low number would seem more likely to be the accurate one.

Is this new, or have I been missing it somehow until recently? I've always viewed this as more estimate, less exact anyway... but now it seems to be WAY off to the point of being somewhat useless.

Could this be related to the rollout of caffeine, and/or expected to be resolved with caffeine?

Any other insight?

[aristotle]

In my opinion this number has always been rather meaningless since it depends on the cutoff point in the measure of relevancy. I also don't think the problem you noticed is new. In any case, Google only shows the first 1000 results anyway, so it's pointless to wonder about anything beyond that.