Dealing with supplemental results in Google's index is nothing new. What is new (sort of) is a secret query that became public recently that allows you to see the supplemental pages for any given site. Unfortunately, it looks like this query has been disabled at some data centers and will likely be disabled across the board.
The first to report on the command being broken is Matt McGee with Rand Fishkin doing a follow-up post. The most interesting point from Rand is that Matt Cutts apparently made a promise to those in attendance at the SMX conference in Seattle that the query would be disabled. I, for one, don't really care and I'm not sure why others do either. Here's why:
- The command is site:domain.com *** -asdfgh or site:domain.com *** -view. In fact, you can put whatever you want after the dash and get results. The problem is the results vary depending on the text used.
- No one has explained why the query works. What's with the three asterisks? Why does changing the text after the dash change the results? I generally don't like trusting something when I can't understand how or why it works.
- The results returned by the query don't match up with the more basic use of the site:searchgrit.com query.
- It's easy enough to find supplemental pages just by setting the number of search results to 100, using the site:searchgrit.com, and clicking through a few pages of the results. Supplemental pages are grouped together after the non-supplemental pages. It takes all of 30 seconds doing it this way.
So whether the undocumented query stays active or disappears makes little difference to me. And I suspect that it'll make little difference to anyone else despite current comments to the contrary.
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