Why does the number of pages in the search not match the search results?

Question

Search engines

Why, when searching for a site in Yandex through host:site.ru, the number of pages found does not match what is written in the webmaster itself? So, when searching through host:site.ru, it says 2 thousand pages were found, but the webmaster displays 50 thousand in the search.

The situation is similar with Google. It says that 47 thousand pages without errors. But in the search through site:site.ru, only 9 thousand were found.

What data do you need to rely on in the end and is this discrepancy normal?

Answer 1

Check the number of indexed pages not through the host operator, but site.
site:site.ru
Continued.
Although the topic seems simple, there are actually pitfalls.
As Artem Vysokov told you, look first of all in both webmaster accounts. The site operator is primarily used to search for information on a site. They can estimate the number of pages in the search very speculatively.
Then another thought came to mind. I looked at some sites by the number of indexed pages in webmasters and came to an interesting conclusion. Service sites, which are most often smaller in terms of page volume, have a minimal discrepancy between the site operator data and cabinets (90 - 95% similarity). But online stores have a large discrepancy: 2-3 times.
The case may be as follows. Service sites most often have unique pages with unique content. Whereas in online stores there are many pages of incomplete duplicates. In online stores, many pages differ from each other by only one or two words. Not all, but often. Example: a section on green Bordeaux kitchen cabinets and beige Bordeaux kitchen cabinets. Such pages will have everything the same, except for 2 words in meta tags and text.
Search engines may consider such pages as insignificant and even spam. Perhaps such discrepancies can be considered some kind of metric to determine the load on the site with low-quality pages. But this still needs to be verified.
If you have a discrepancy of 5 to 20 times, then review your pages. Are they sufficiently unique? If not, do these pages generate any significant traffic? It might be better to combine them into one.

Answer 2

Rely on the data that is in the webmaster, operators (what is hots: what is site:) do not always provide correct information, but in the webmaster this is true.