Gary Illyes from Google seems to have a new interest, making the site command more reliable for some sites. He posted on Twitter the other day that he is looking for examples of when the site command count returns "wildly off" numbers compared to what shows in Google Search Console for the number of pages indexed on your site.
Gary wrote "I ran into a piece of feedback about the number of results for a site: command being wildly off. If you have examples for this that you can share publicly, I'd appreciate them very much." He does not want examples from low quality sites, nor does he want examples of when the count is off by less than 10%.
Here are his tweets:
Example I'd be interested in: quality site has 300.000 URLs indexed according to eg. Search Console, we only show 500 in site: .
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) September 11, 2020
Examples I'm not interested in:
a. lowq site only has 1 URL indexed out of 42.
b. difference between # of actual and site: is less than 10%
This is the count, obviously swap out the site:www.domain.com with your domain name:
Compare it to your Search Coverage or Sitemap report in Search Console:
The issue is, I have not seen more than one person submit any feedback. Gary said you have to submit it publicly, he does not want private emails or DMs with examples.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
