site: search now returning a higher number

just like link: has for a while

[rjohara]

Google's link: command has for some time returned a higher number of results that it displays. If I search "link:widget.com" I might be told there are 500 results, but only 250 are displayed.

Until recently the site: command didn't do that: searching for "widget site:widget.com" would claim to find, say, 250 pages, and it would return very close to that number (maybe 247 or something like that). It now appears that the site: command is behaving like the link: command. On one of my sites, "widget site:widget.com" claims to find 415 pages, but only returns 227. There are in fact about 227 pages on the site, and that is roughly the number that has always been returned before.

With the link: search I can imagine that there are "below the threshold" pages out there that aren't being displayed, but I don't see how that could work with the site: command. Any thoughts on this? Am I correct that it is new? Perhaps it is the number of pages on the site in the last update, plus the number of pages that have been freshed - that would come out about right.

[coconutz]

I've noticed the same when using the site: command the last couple of days also. I'm only able to see half of the results returned. I'm not sure about this, but I think the link: command results do not include the "below the threshold" pages.

[WebRankInfo]

This looks very similar to what happened for the link:URL command.
One month (in the begining of 2002) the number of links given for my site suddenly "doubled", but only half of the results were given. For a lot of sites there are exactly half of the results that can be displayed.

I'm pretty sure that the real number of links is half of what is said. But you have to add all the links "under the threshold"!

It looks like Google does the same bizarre thing with site: as with link: command...

[Chico_Loco]

I'm not sure about this, but I think the link: command results do not include the "below the threshold" pages.

I can't imagine this being the case. If this were to be true then the people who use the google search engine to provide site seach on their site would be very annoyed as not every page has over the threshold pagerank of PR4, especially if they were doing a site: search for internal pages!

[espeed]

On my site, the site command shows 2,680 pages, but only has links for 235; however, on the last results page it says:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 235 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.:

Repeating the search with omitted results permits access up to 1000 results (100 pages), and that appears to be the max you can access for any site.