Site: doesn't require a search term?

[Kwix]

Just checking on a competitor's keywords in his site with the site:www.example.com option and hit "return" before typing the search word. Lo and behold, Google returned all indexed pages and not a "Please enter term" error message.

I may be slow at this, but when did this change happen?

[edited by: ciml at 10:50 pm (utc) on Feb. 13, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URL. [/edit]

[mcavill]

it was about a couple of weeks ago.

[JeremyL]

A theory on why
[webmasterworld.com...]

[ThomasB]

GG talked about it in Brandy, part 1. The reason was that it's normally faster and less performance-consuuming this way, because most people used "site:site.com -adirtyword" to get the number of sites indexed. Now they removed the need of "-adirtyword" because it consumes more power than a search without it.