Site: Operator Giving Odd Results With "inurl" and Without

[Veloxi]

Hey guys, long time lurker, IIRC, first time poster. :) I'm writing because I'm encountering an odd problem, and was wondering if anyone else had run into it and, if so, what could be done about it.

We manage a site at, say, http://www.example.com

Now, for several weeks, when using "site:www.example.com" in Google, the page count given has been slowly dropping, and has gone from the 2000-3000 page range, it's now down in the 700's.

However, when we use "site:www.example.com inurl:www.example.com", Google gives us 31,000 pages indexed. If we use "site:example.com inurl:example.com", we get around 4,000 pages indexed.

We've never fully trusted the "site:" command, but I'm thinking these results are indicative of a problem with the site that should be looked into. Either that, or Google is just not giving us the true results.

Therefore, I'd like to know, what do you think? Is this just Google hiding its true numbers? Could there be a problem with our site? Any advice or insight you might have would be very beneficial. Thank you for reading, and I look forward to your answers/help/advice. :)

[tedster]

Is this just Google hiding its true numbers?

Not intentionally - but that's still the actual effect. Here's the challenge Google has. These estimated "about" numbers are not easily arrived at, because their back end is not just one conventional -- though massive -- database. Instead their data about sites and pages is sharded across many different types of datasets, and then recombined at query time. Their priority is the set of results itself, rather than accurate numbers which the average search user doesn't care about very much.

Could there be a problem with our site?

It's not likely that these particular site: operator results point to a problem for your site. The "about" numbers have been getting less and less reliable in recent times, especially as user intention and universal or blended results have come into the picture.

When there is more than one type of input in the search query (simple terms combined with special operator, or more than one special operator in the same query) then the estimated numbers tend to go far awry. For example, take a given query and make note of that that number. Then add a minus sign operator to an added term. The results should be a lower number, right? But instead, the number you get is often is higher!