link: Yahoo vs Google

why 2 different figures (vastly different)

[MrSniffles]

Anyone know why there are 2 totally different accounts of number of incoming links when you do 'link:' for a site?

[nuevojefe]

Google only displays a random (sort of) depiction of your backlinks.

Yahoo is more accurate at showing your backlinks but is also unlikely to have all existant backlinks at any given time.

Also, they are two different engines and probably never have the exact same backlinks listed for your site (whether they report them in a link: query or not).

[treeline]

Because Yahoo reports basically what they know. Google shows only a select subset of sites linking to yours. For a while they only showed links of PR4 or higher, now it seems to be a random sampling, but never complete. Helps confuse people trying to copy all of your backlinks, assuming they don't know there are other search engines.....