I think Google backlinks may have gone the way of their recent PageRank "prank". I managed to get a good glimpse of the updated backlinks across my network of sites before they disappeared and I can see a direct relationship with recent rises in traffic leading me to believe that Google is still using the updated backlinks, just not showing them to the public.
i.e. they HAVE updated the backlinks but have just decided to function the "link:" search query to the old database.
Kind of like the PageRank updates - of course, that's assuming you agree with me that PageRank WAS updated just never shown in the toolbar for a long time.
