One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1,000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate content, confirming robots.txt changes, or doing advanced index sculpting, that 1,000-page barrier can be extremely limiting when you're dealing with a site with 10,000 or more indexed pages.
So, how can we dig deeper into the index and really see the big picture?
The Tools – Site: and Inurl:drow last names
First off, you're going to need a couple of tools. I'll assume that most of you are familiar with Google's "site:" command, which returns the indexed pages from any given domain or subdomain. Let's take our friends here at SEOmoz as an example. Type "site:seomoz.org" into Google's search box, and you'll see something like this:

The other command we'll be using is "inurl:", which, paired with other search terms, restricts the results to only those containing a specific keyword in the URL. Paired with the "site:" command, Google only reveals indexed pages which contain those URL keywords.
The Tactic – Index Deconstruction
Using our SEOmoz example, how can we find out which pages are included in the roughly 12,000-page index when we can only see those pages 1,000 at a time? Those last three words are the key: we can only see 1,000 pages at a time, but depending on how we construct our searches, they don't have to be the same 1,000 pages. By splitting up our index searches logically, we can break the full index up into manageable chunks. We'll do this by using "inurl:" to force the "site:" command to show us the index through smaller windows.
An Example – Deconstructing SEOmozdrow last names
This is one of those techniques that's much easier to illustrate with an example. Let's say that we needed to dig deeply into SEOmoz's 12,000 indexed pages. The first thing that we might do is to take a look at the main navigation to get an idea of the URL/folder structure of the site. Looking at the top-right navigation on SEOmoz, we see the following (I've added the numbers 1-6 - see below):

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