Is the site command just a sampling, like the link command?

[dmje]

When using the site:www.example.com or site:example.com in google is this just a sampling of the number of pages indexed or is it the total?

In checking other search engines, I see the following

Google: 723
MSN Search: 1,849
Yahoo: 1,630

With MSN being the closest to the actual number of site pages as they seem to crawl our site more often and deeper than the others.

I find it hard to digest the large difference in the numbers between google and the others, I would think that if the others show that number of pages then google also knows about them, but the site command only gives a sampling, similar to the link command.

[moftary]

AFAIK, the site command gives an accurate number of pages harvested by Google bots. However, numbers can change dramatically across different DCs.