Google Sitemaps and site:command - why do the numbers not match?

[dmje]

My sitemap has 1346 URL's listed, I did not include the 1000 or so urls that are just larger images of my products and the sitemap has been in use with google since the google sitemaps xml beta program began.

When I do the site:mydomain.com the pages it shows as indexed varies from 700 to 1000 right now with all the BigDaddy mess going on.

My question is why aren't the numbers somewhat closer since the bot visits my site at least once a day, every day and downloads the sitemap at least once a day, everyday. One would think that the number of indexed pages would at least be close to the actual number of pages on the site map. I thought that was the whole purpose of the sitemap, to help the bot find and crawl the pages.

[ashear]

The numbers posted in the search results are purely estimated. A request on an exact count with a database of that size is very difficult. So the search engine estimates the count.

Thus if you search for a keyword, you see results 1-10 of about #*$!.

[dmje]

The numbers posted in the search results are purely estimated. A request on an exact count with a database of that size is very difficult. So the search engine estimates the count.
Thus if you search for a keyword, you see results 1-10 of about #*$!.

ashear,

Am I understanding you correctly that the number of indexed pages returned when using the site:mydomain.com command is just an estimate of the number of pages indexed?

If that is the case how is one to determine just how many pages of his/her site are actually indexed in google?

[daveVk]

"how is one to determine just how many pages of his/her site are actually indexed in google?"

Go to last page of search results, click "show omited" if this message is showing and go to last page again. As google limits returned results to 1000, it will not work on larger sites.

As for original question, lots of sites have less than 50% of pages indexed