Search engines - Conundrum

I have been amazed by the results of any query on a web search engine. Typically the number of search results displayed by the search engines run into several million except if the search criteria is very narrow. I have always wondered what is the relevance of giving out that huge number of results when hardly any user goes beyond the third page to check - as anything beyond will be anyways irrelevant for the search criteria. The usual habit - go and refine the search criteria.

Then why so much computing power is spent in giving out these many results which will hardly ever be used ? The rise of google has been amazing considering what I have enumerated - just imagine the market cap of 150 Billion USD in a business model where the users still dont pay for use of its services. In my opinion if the search engines devote all their algorithms to display the correct match in the first 3 pages - half the work is done.

Google has become part of our every day lives its hard to imagine a day without it. Terms like "googling" , " did you google " are part of our normal conversations. Everyone has a gmail account - most of the ideas people share these days are of Gmail rather than yahoo and hotmail. No wonder to counter the onslaught hotmail has increased the mailbox size to I GB.

A small tid bit - If you try and search the word "search" in google and yahoo the results are surprising - try it out.