Link Anomaly

[renee]

I found this by accident. I was doing a "link:www.mysite.com" but i accidentally typed "link: www.mysite.com" (with the space between link: and www). Voila - I find a completely different set of sites linking to me compared to the one without the space.

So I tried it for yahoo on both www and sj:

link:www.yahoo.com (661,000 on www, 384000 on sj)
link: www.yahoo.com (127000 on www, 71300 on sj)

What does this mean? Looking for analysis and comments.

[chinook]

now you are searching for the word link and google ignores the :

[renee]

Thanks chinook. But why do these sites not appear in the search without the space?

[chinook]

if you were to search google for sites that contain your domain name then they would show up.