The counts are just plain not accurate, and it's that way for very good technical reasons and not simply laziness. Different search engines estimate the total counts in different ways, and while plenty of conspiracy theorists say they lie to make themselves seem more impressive, I don't really believe that. (Well, maybe MSN lies*.)

One way to get a more accurate count, if you have few enough results for a query, is to just go to the last page of results. You'll often get text like "results 10 - 13 of about 5000 results" on the last page.


* kidding