Smaaz’s Blog

Link Search At Live.com Has Been Disabled

March 29th, 2007

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Some of you, might have noticed, that the “link:” command at Live.com has returned a blank page, over the last couple of days. Today, a manager from Live Search, informed us, that the “link:” command will remain offline for some time:

“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.”

So, it is not clear, when the link command will be back, but there are some speculation that Live Search will come up with a Webmaster Tool similar to Google’s Webmaster Central or Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

Entry Filed under: Microsoft / Live.com