tedster - 2:21 am on Jul 7, 2008 (gmt 0)

All these special queries are not official Google offerings. They are essentially hacks that the webmaster community has found. What Google offers us officially is the vanilla version of the operator - site:example.com. From what I can see site:/example.com and site:example.com/* are both returning a list of urls that are in the regular or main index. That is, the urls reported are not in off in some lower level partition, such as the supplemental index. But that's only roughly true, and there's no guarantee that those queries will always return ALL such urls.

These hacks were found by experiment and experience, and it's up to us who use them to monitor the results and judge for ourselves what value they hold. We're poking around Google's edges, seeing what extra tidbits we can discover.

I have growing misgivings about "betting the farm" on anything shown in these unofficial queries. For instance, to decide on what urls Google is "fully inclduing" in the index, I often will check their partner sites, such as AOL. And when I do that, the results of a site: query are often slightly lower than doing site:/example.com on Google. Is Google is exporting a slighlty more limited set of data to their partners? That's what it looks like to me.

In terms of official Google comment on the UK search issues - I'd say if Goole hasn't commented by now through their official blogs or the Google Groups, then they're not likely to say anything. We certainly have no ability to get official answers from any company (including Google) about how their proprietary technology works. We can ask for, try for, and hope for increased transparency, but there will always be a limit. We may have just banged into one.