I suppose it’s remotely possible that these numbers are correct, there are no years with an in-between number of hits, and for some reason they’re just not showing you most of the promised pages when you try to flip through them.
If you scrolled to the last page for each, you’d find that the smaller counts were roughly accurate, but the counts in the hundreds of thousands had no more actual results than their neighbors. I can’t find a good example now (perhaps they’ve smoothed it out a bit) but when searching for things like “I was born in ”, the results for successive years would look something like this: When I was making the Numbers comic, I didn’t use the API, and there were a few graphs I had to throw out, crop, or put on an unnecessary log scale otherwise, Google’s clumsy number-fudging made the graphs look nonsensical. This doesn’t usually matter, since nobody looks much past the first few pages of results, but it’s annoying if you’re trying to use the number of results as a measure of something. When you get to page 32, it suddenly becomes:
You can tell that it’s wrong first by scrolling to the end of the results. The “number of results” count that Google gives when you search is clearly fabricated. Not only is the API helpful in making these kinds of charts (which I spend more time doing than I care to admit), it also gives a roughly accurate count of results-in contrast to the Google search page. I generated this using a Google API variable search tool developed by Eviltwin on #xkcd (I’m not linking to the tool so as to avoid potentially getting his API key revoked) Edit: He now offers the source and says it can be run without a key, and is happy to let people use it until Google does something. The first word is on the top, the second down the side (the opposite of the intuitive way, of course). It’s a chart of Google results for “ X Y” (in quotes) where X and Y are words from the first panel of the strip. Here’s something I made as I drew today’s comic.
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