Believe it. The number of hosts you see in the Statistics window is not even close so don't rely on that number as accurate.

Currently LimeWire has no method to accurately estimate the number of hosts that are available to you through your connections to ultrapeer nodes.

It is *SOMETIMES* true that the more hosts you have, the more search results you get. It just depends on what you're searching for to begin with and it also depends on the quality of the hosts you are connected to. Sometimes the number of hosts in your horizon has no bearing on the quality or quantity of search results you receive.

The only way you can increase the number of hosts you see is to increase the number of connections you have to other nodes in the Connections tab. However, depending on the speed of your internet connection, you may be limited in the number of connections you can maintain to other nodes.