It’s confirmed by Google that there’s an issue with the ‘site:’ command that might fail to show the numbers of indexed pages over the website.
Google’s Danny Sullivan tweets that the sites affected by today’s issue are specifically targeted to particular sites, also he confirms in his tweet separately that the issue has been investigated and even some of the other potential problems related to the ‘site:’ command which are not working
We are aware of an issue with the site: command that may fail to show some or any indexed pages from a website. We are investigating this and any potentially related issues.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 21, 2020
So basically the ‘site:’ command is designed to help the searchers to find the number of pages within the site containing a specific keyword or phrase.
For instance, if you are using the ‘site:’ command to find content within your own website, just be aware that you might not find some or all the content regarding the page whether it has been properly indexed.
Just to be sure that this is not an issue with Google’s Index, but the problem is with the command itself.
Content or phrase which cannot be found with the ‘site:’command it can still be surfaced with other queries
Update
Google has confirmed that this issue is fixed.
Today we became aware of an issue that impacted some navigational and site: operator searches. We investigated & have since fixed the bug. Contrary to some speculation, this did not target particular sites or political ideologies….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 21, 2020
