Comment by lucianof

I don't think it's a meaningless number. Maybe I want to know compare the frequency of two terms, then Google's estimate of results is pretty useful. On the other hand result number 230,000,000 is certainly not useful. Well, it might be a little useful, but there are 229,999,999 documents that Google thinks are more useful to me, so it is a reasonable optimization by Google to not actually prepare a results page for it.