Site: command changes numbers with each refresh

[JS_Harris]

After doing a site command to see how many pages are indexed I can refresh the page and get a different value with each refresh, is this a new thing or has it been like this for a long time? My search didn't return anything about this.

[tedster]

I've never seen the site: operator numbers change with a page refresh - just with clicking deeper. I just tried a few sites and I see stable numbers on refresh right now. What you're seeing sounds very strange, even though the numbers are only reporting "about" however many pages.

[g1smd]

I see the described change from time to time... what you are likely seeing is data from several datacentres or indexes in rotation.

A couple of months ago I could swap between 1 - 88 of about 89 and 1 - 85 of about 88 every few clicks (I use the &num=100 parameter a lot).

Adding &filter=0 made the numbers go *down*, which surprised me. The effect lasted a couple of days and then fixed it itself.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:18 pm (utc) on June 6, 2009]
[edit reason] fixed typo per poster request [/edit]

[JS_Harris]

It seems to have subsided. During the flux the total number of pages being returned for the primary keyword of the site were also bouncing around by 10's of millions of pages, those are stable at the lower number again.

Google must have been under the hood.