I found that going to the last page showed a more realistic number for results. This would only be shown on that "last page" of results though. However, it does seem strange that there are only 447 results for a google search of "apple"[0] down from a whopping 4,070,000,000 results shown before that page. And that is with show omitted results. Seems like max result limiting for the 0.1% of users that want to look past page 10 of search results[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&start=440&sa=N&filter=...
pheug|5 years ago
The 447 results you paged through are just the most relevant docs for your particular query ("apple" + country) and Google doesn't bother retrieving any further. Your use case of finding all the pages with the term "apple" is simply too rare and too expensive to support and they don't optimize for it.
If you try different query variants apple + something with different locales (&hl=) you'd get very different top NNN results.