Ok, this one’s not really a combination, but let’s start with the basics. Paired with a root domain or sub-domain, the [site:] operator returns an estimated count of the number of indexed pages for that domain. The “estimated” part is important, but we’ll get to that later. For a big picture, I generally stick to the root domain (leave out the “www”, etc.).
Each combo in this post will have a clickable example (see below). I’m picking on Amazon.com in my examples, because they’re big enough for all of these combos to come into play:
You’ll end up with two bits of information: (1) the actual list of pages in the index, and (2) the count of those pages (circled in purple below):
I think we can all agree that 273,000,000 results is a whole lot more than most of us would want to sort through. Even if we wanted to do that much clicking, Google would stop us after 100 pages. So, how can we get more sophisticated and drill down into the Google index?
