The first PicasaWeb search bug?

Yes, finally (some) public photos across Picasa Web Albums are now searchable.  For a photo to be searchable, the owner of the photo must elect to have their public albums searchable, which is not the default.

It's been interesting to note how throughout today the number of photos returned by a search has rapidly increased - as more and more people elect to have their photos searchable in this way.

However, it's also become apparent that Google have not tested this feature all that well - there is a rather glaring bug that may not have shown up in a small scale test - but is showing up more and more now - PicasaWeb cannot count!  If a search returns a few results, then the results page typically says something like "1 - 24 of 59".  This number is typically an estimation, but PicasaWeb is taking estimation to a new extreme - if there are more than about 20000 results, then PicasaWeb returns a nine digit number.  I really don't believe that this number has any significance - and in fact it seems to vary quite wildly.

As an example, one of the most popular words in most photo sharing sites in "wedding".  As I type this, entering that in to PicasaWeb returns "1 - 24 of 506589391" for me (YMMV).

That claimed number of photos is much greater than the total number of photos on the currently much more popular Flickr service.  Another popular word is beach, which also currently gives a 9 digit count on PicasaWeb - but if you combine the two words, a search for  - wedding beach - returns a believable (and verifiable) 377 count - which is not far off the true figure.  (The best way to find the true figure is to page through to the last page of the results - which forces the search engine to get true numbers - which in this case shows to be 366 as against the 377 estimate).