Seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but you can easily prove that it's wrong by doing a search for a single word, so there is no step (3).
I did a search for "hackerspace" (no quotes) and it claims "About 588,000 results." Paging through the results, I eventually got "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 390 already displayed." Even with omitted entries included, there only seems to be 832 results.
I agree. When I follow kuschku's link (starting at the 900th result), there is no next page link at the bottom, and if I try hacking the "start" value in the URL to go even one document farther I get no results and a "Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 901.)" below the search box.
I did a search for "hackerspace" (no quotes) and it claims "About 588,000 results." Paging through the results, I eventually got "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 390 already displayed." Even with omitted entries included, there only seems to be 832 results.