Sorry, no more results

I was trading a few emails with Tim Bray tonight about his blog post on sorting search results. Tim explained in his post why only the top several hundred results of a search are actually sorted for relevancy. It takes too much computing power to sort all the results, and virtually no one looks past the first couple of hundred of results, anyway. Sure enough, during the exchange, I stumbled upon the fact that Google never serves up more than 1,000 results. I’m certainly not the first person to notice this. And it makes sense when you think about it. But it also makes you wonder what Google really means when it says it’s returned � in the case of the query above � 1,370,000 results.