Here is my current understanding of how these counts work numBuckets : Is supposed to tell the user how many unique buckets were seen in the facet calculation. Given that we currently don't do refinements this number can be equal or less than the actual number of unique buckets
count : The total number of values which were taken into consideration for the facet calculation. For single valued fields this would be equal to the number matching documents And these would behave the same way for the sub-facets as well.