The Google Sitemaps team (Vanessa Fox, Google Engineering) admits that Google has bugs for the site: operator.
Unfortunately, with change of this scale, there sometimes are bugs. In this case, we found a few bugs that affected the site: operator. Some particular ones you may have noticed are that the following types of queries don’t return the correct number of results:
* site: queries where you type in a trailing slash (such as site:www.example.com/)
* site: queries for a domain with punctuation (such as site: www.example-site.com)We’ve got fixes for all of these rolling out in the next few days. They didn’t come out sooner because we’ve been testing them thoroughly, making sure you don’t get any unexpected surprises.
FINALLY they admit it.
Let’s just not get our hopes up until we actually see it fixed!!! How long have these bugs been going on for now!!!!!
As they say, for some time.
And the changes (eg. fixes) are just rolling out to all the DC’s. That might take a few days/weeks maybe.
This is already on Matt Cutt’s website…and the fix is already rolled out. Discovered May 5th according to Matt’s timeline.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/
He speaks about different issues there.
He states that ALL problems have been fixed, but in a very gentle manner, as if they never existed. His post is dated May 16th. The post on the Google Sitemaps Blog is dated May 19th, and it is there that clear indication of the BUGS in the link: operator are stated.