Site operator - site: - does it work for you and how do you use it?

Improving our experiences and understandings of the site operator tool

[Whitey]

This seems like such an important tool, and i think many webmasters may rely on it.

However, a recent post highlighted some issues with it's performance [webmasterworld.com...] and i continue to wonder:

Is it reliable and working? and

How is it intended to be useful for webmasters?

I've been using it to measure the quality of our pages [ per supplemental listings , and , how many pages are cached and available to produce results.]

My concern is that one week I'm leaping about delighted that our pages are coming back [ say 563 showing under a sub URL e.g. site:example.co.uk/Widget1/ ] , and then the next week i see us down to 53. Usually, i go to the sub URL as i thought it easier to see, to what depth the cached pages are being indexed.

I might then go to our regional DC and i see it almost fully cached and then i go to "google.com" and i see predominantly supplementals consisting of old pages. So the DC's are not consistant i nwhat they show with this tool.

When i go to webmastercentral and observe the crawl rates, i can see that googlebot is crawling 10 to 15% of our pages daily [ which ones they are, i do not know ]- but this is not translating to cached pages shown by the site operator tool.

Really, what i'm questioning is: is the site operator tool reliable and is it the best method to check the health of a site's pages, and what else can it be used for and how.

[edited by: tedster at 1:55 am (utc) on Oct. 30, 2006]

[edited by: Whitey at 2:05 am (utc) on Oct. 30, 2006]

[g1smd]

Since late in 2005 the site command seems to be "broken" in various subtle and non-trivial ways: especially in its interaction with the supplemental database, and with URLs containing certain types of punctuation, and even for a while: pages with "noindex" tags on them.

[Whitey]

A demonstration of how this tool could wreak havoc in it's current, supposedly unstable state is when assumptions are made against it's findings.

For example, right now we are recovering from duplicate content issues and our sites are being re cached. One of our site's is more or less behaving correctly, according to the site tool - [ the site tool reflects my expectancy ].

However, my speculation and assumption is that the same applies to our other sites. [ True or false - i have no real idea ] So, the site tool appears to show the right no of pages in *total* , but a small proportion cached.

Now in my moments of uncertainty i have put an interpretation on this, which is, maybe those pages are of no value, so Google is not caching them. This might be crazy, but what else am i to think.

It also leads me to question, is this tool telling us more than we currently know?