TL;DR: "You know that Google problem everyone knows about, how it reports millions or even billions of 'results', but actually serves a couple hundred at most? Well, shocker of shockers, it turns out that the API has the same problem!"
Google really needs to stop using the word 'result' for whatever it supposedly denotes, which is probably something like the estimated number of pages crawled by Google which contain hits for those terms, the majority of which will not be a search 'result' (something delivered by the search function) under any circumstances.
Google really needs to stop using the word 'result' for whatever it supposedly denotes, which is probably something like the estimated number of pages crawled by Google which contain hits for those terms, the majority of which will not be a search 'result' (something delivered by the search function) under any circumstances.