Get total count of tweets from a API search result?

Hello Guy's I'm trying to count all of the tweets from a Twitter search API response, anyone got any ideas?

Everything I tried doesn't seem to work, I'm doing everything with jSON so my best guess is get the max_id and subtract the id from the first item in the object. But I think that's not giving me a correct number.

I'm guessing you can't do that: the twitter api docs don't show anything and you can see Count number of results for a particular word on Twitter for more detail.