MSN, the third largest search engine on the internet seem destined to remain number three with most of the strategies it seem to be pursuing. Not only does it seem to have an identity crisis, does not know whether to call itself MSN the name which it has become well known by over the years or rebrand to Windows Live the name it prefers to call itself recently.
Recently, while the two leading search engines, Google and Yahoo are working closely with developers and rightful thwarting unreasonable automated queries, MSN has taken the decision to black every one out of being able to make queries such as backlinks checking and other queries SEOs and web developers tends to make.
Blog post below from Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager goes as follows:
For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.
We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve. Our apologies and thank you for being patient. Keep an eye on our blog for updates.
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