Google site: command can produce funny results

a space after the site: seems to give more realistic results

[biggles338]

If I do a site:www.mysite.com search in google I get zero reults as I have since about October last year.
However I just noticed that if I do site: www.mysite.com I get about 9,000 results which is quite similar to the other search engines.
Does Google now require a space between the site: and the url to tell what it really knows about, and without the space it tells what it thinks of your site?

[tedster]

We've received a number of posts about this phenomonon. As I understand it, the answer is that when you put a space after the site: operator, you are no longer using the site: operator.

Instead you are searching on two terms, one of which is your domain name. The results are bound to be similar, but they will not be confined to just the pages from your domain that are in the index.