WMT indexed URLs vs. site: operator - which is more accurate?

[thinkoutofthebox]

My new site has been indexed for a month, I can see around 600 results while doing a "site:" search on Google, but after submitting a sitemap, it says there're 30,000 URLs in web index from the Google Webmaster Tools, and the number is growing. The strange thing is, the number of results from "site:" is slowly decreasing...

So, I was wondering which number is more accurate?

[tedster]

The site: operator is usually a lot less accurate - but not by several orders of magnitude. You might get a better idea of your real situation from your server log analytics. If you're getting Google search traffic to a page, then it is indexed, not matter what either source of data says.

[mhansen]

How many pages are actually on the site?

[g1smd]

The site: operator and a keyword (preferably a word that appears on every page of your site) is a lot more accurate.

[netmeg]

Really? I tried that with two different words that appear on every page, and got one result of about 354 and another one that was over 1800 pages. (There's about 1600 in the sitemap at the moment)

[g1smd]

I didn't say it was perfect. :)

It's just that for sites I look at, WMT counts are completely wrong. So, site+keyword is "better".