Google “site:” operator broken
- 6th Oct 2006
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Rumours are afoot around the search world that Google’s site:, link: and other operators are soon to be moved into the Webmaster Tools section.
We all know about link: so some prime examples of site: broken are:
| Domain | Claimed pages | Special info | TBPR |
|---|---|---|---|
| www.zippy.co.uk | 728 | PR0 | |
| www.zecco.com | 125 | dupcon filt | PR0 |
| www.shawnhogan.com | 711 | PR0 | |
| www.1000misspenthours.com | 850 | PR5 | |
| www.101registerme.com | 314 | PR5 | |
| www.123rul.dk | 696 | PR0 | |
| www.webstartplace.biz | 385 | PR0 | |
| www.alierra.com | 100 | PR5 | |
| www.sea-doo.com | 137 | Corp. site | PR6 |
| www.ostomy-winnipeg.ca | 389 | PR4 | |
| www.mumbaiflorist.com | 679 | PR6 | |
| www.thebookofdays.com | 337 | 1sup | PR5 |
| www.shadedrelief.com | 95 | PR6 | |
| www.avansis.ch | 184 | PR4 |
As you can see, Google claims to have indexed many pages from these sites, yet only shows results 1 - 3. Some of these domains are spammy, some are good-boy Corps, some are new, some are old, some have PR, some don’t, etc. We’re not 100% finalised on why these domains are experiencing this yet.
14 Comments | Leave a comment »
Is it just me, or is it only google.co.uk that’s showing results 1-3? I can see all results for the above in google.com
Yes, my blog is with the same problem!
site:josefernandes.pt
Regards,
Jose Fernandes
Site operator is seriously broken. Site:davidnaylor.co.uk shows the first few results as non supplemental but the rest are supps. This applies to a LOT of sites right now. First few results ok, but then supps only.
We have several unique catalog sites, which are all heavily seasoned, youngest is three years old, and we are experiencing the same supplemental results, prior to Tuesday we were authorities in our space. We also just launched a new server with several sites on it and it is only showing first three results for a search. Looks like they really broke it this time, or was that their intent?
Best Regards
It had already been broken for more than a week.
There were sporadic reports of this more than two weeks ago. At first it was only on a few of their 44 datacentres but it gradually spread to almost all of them by a few nights ago.
Most sites only showed 3 results in total, or showed 3 normal results, followed by some supplemental results, for a site total that was often less than 10% of the real number of pages.
The supplemental results often had a date only a few weeks old, whereas the “correct” results had mainly being showing a cache date from 6 months ago. Most sites returned almost nothing from the normal index.
This morning it looks like the problem has been fixed again.
Was this an import of data to the servers that went seriously wrong, or was it that data meant for the normal index just went missing, or was the data really there and it was just a bug in pulling that data from the database to populate the search results?
I’ll guess we’ll never know….
They were pushing a new binary; the site: command is showing plenty of results for me now.
I’ve recently seen a site with zero site: results but still has pages that return cache: results. any idea what’s going on there?
Craig TBH I would need to see the site.
DaveN
Will it ever stop? Google used to be predictable and stable. Oh boy, do I long for those days.. Oh well. I guess that is just another “feature” to add to the list.
Congrats on your Matt Cutt’s link!
Good work David - glad you helped to raise awareness with Matt on this one.
Anybody saw that the supplemental index operator not working any more?
( site:domain.com ***)
If all of your pages are supposed to be listed as www then this search:
site:domain.com -inurl:www
will still show you all of your www Supplemental Results.
You might need to add &filter=0 to the search URL to get the full picture.
Links to this page from other sites were originally indexed as http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2006/10/06/google-site-operator-broken/ but that URL now returns a 404 error.
There is no 301 redirect to get you to the new URL here at: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-site-operator-broken.html
Likewise for the rest of the old “archive” URLs.