I must have not been paying much attention recently, but apparently, MSN search (Live search) now no longer allows search queries like link: linkdomain: or inrul:… According to Eytan Seidman, the lead program manager of Live Search at Microsoft, this is to prevent people from abusing these features via mass automated data mining…
Hmm, what does that suppose to mean? It might be that such queries make a significant impact on their overall search performance. If that was true, then it would be quite obvious that the infrastructure upon which Microsoft’s Live Search runs on has serious scalability issues compares to Google’s. We may never know the real reason… but it will certainly be interesting to see how it performs when this functionality does come back.
