Can someone explain to me why when I run my base search, it has exponentially more Events in the same time frame compared to the summary index search (based on the base search).
My main concern is if I am having gaps in log events or not.
The summary index report runs every two hours looking back two hours.
Events will be timestamped so perhaps subsequent searches are finding events in the same time frame which weren't present when the summary index was created. Have a look at the _indextime field for the events to see if there is a spread which would account for this. Also, have a look to see if your events have been duplicated in your subsequent searches.
Other things you could check is whether the data in your summary index is correct (for the event which were present at the time they were added to the summary index.