IMHO ... It tells you what pages google WANTS you to know THEY know about only. It may well be that they have cached copies of other pages as well, that it will not show in such a search. Google only lets you see a limited amount of what it wants you to see, NOT all that they know.
It will bring up the same result as site:/www.domain.com that i suspect show cached pages, or pages that are not in the "sandbox"
You may have discovered something rather interesting here. The domains I tested with this type of query returned fewer results than site:www.domain.com or site:www.domain.com/ did. By running the /* query on my own site, the few pages that appeared were those which: (a) Bring in lots of traffic from searches, and/or (b) Have PageRank...
I was told they were the the only pages on your site that Google really knows/cares about. Which was a bit vague so I posted here to see if there was a definite answer. vpguy - Interesting. It does back up the theory that Google only really pays attention to these pages.
Interesting,, the pages shown are the only ones that bring traffic.... great find. I wonder what other command there are that are not published?
In my blogs that search returns only pages with unique content. This is, front page, posts and pages, not dates, categories, tags, etc...
with site:mydomain.com i got 780 results while with site:mydomain.com/* i got only 34 results then i carefully noticed all the results of /* i found they were getting backlinks(deep links) from other websites(mostly social book') showed up
these are the pages that are not in your supplemental pages index. the /* result is actually the only number that matters.
I thought you all were on crack until I re-read the first post and noticed I missed the "site" when I did my searches Notice the difference btw www.domain.com & www.domain.com/* as well
I don't think it is just backlinks. I'm very certain that nobody is linking to my site's contact form, which is one of the results that appears for my site using the /* query. It has no PageRank and brings in no traffic. What is interesting, though, is that my site's contact page links to Google. Coincidence? It would appear to me that the site:www.internet.tube/* query returns pages which meet one or more of the following criteria: 1. Have PageRank 2. Have backlinks 3. Bring in search traffic 4. Link to Google
Ok when I did that search here is what I discovered. Pages that had backlinks Pages that had PR That being said it would appear that they are pages that google only cares about even thought there are thousands more that are indexed!
Someone already posted the right answer. site:domain.com/* used to return pages that are in the main index. Those pages typically have more PageRank than pages in the supplemental index. Now, the results are much less accurate but it still reflects the authority of a given site. For example, compare the numbers for article directories: ezinearticles.com 190,000 articlebase.com 26,600 rateempire.com 645 articlebag.com 12 That basically means you'll probably get more juice by submitting to ezinearticles than rateempire and submitting to sites like articlebag.com would probably be a waste of time because your article will not even make it into the main index.
It is (or was) results that are 'supplemental'. But these supplemental pages are now treated differently. I just checked a result where I happen to come both number 1 and number 3 in the serps (for a pretty non-competitive term, about 200,000 results), and my page that shows in number 1 position is a page that is listed as 'supplemental' (ie doesn't show up under a /* query, while the result at position number 3 is the homepage of a different site that is not 'supplemental'. So it's a broad guide how well a site is indexed, but pages excluded under /* are still shown in the results. Note for pagerank watchers...the page in number 1 position is PR0 while the page in number 3 position is PR3.