This is something i discovered the other day, if you search for a in google you get: "Results 1 - 30 of about 24,980,000,000 for a. (0.19 seconds)" although you search for "Results 1 - 30 of about 14,200,000,000 for -a. (0.13 seconds" and only that many is displayed, "-a" displays the whole index but i though google only had 8 billion pages? Is this a big bug or something?

I think the numbers in the reported page count are often way too big. Last I heard they only had 8 billion pahges or so.

It could be that they turned up the crawl speed of their spider. It's been visiting my site 3 times a day(averaged number) for over a month now. It's average before that was about once a day. I think it has to do with Yahoo! announcing that they had the biggest index a few months back( over 20 billion pages I think ).

They could also be ditching the SandBox or making it a less of a factor in order to get more new pages and sites into thier index. I was just reading how a bunch of PR 0 pages and domains just got gifted PR all at once.

In the end only Google knows what Google does but it I would want the biggest index if I was a search engine, especially if I was the #1 search engine