Don’t blame me if you know about this already and bless me if you don’t. Actually I found it just hours ago from Andy Beard’s Blog Post. MSN Disabled link and linkdomain commands back in March 2007. I was surprised to find that it was back more than a month back. Neither MSN announced it officially, nor when I tried old commands, even they didn’t worked at MSN so I thought that they were still disabled. MSN reintroduced them cleverly for sure. 
New Commands have just one difference: they have to have a plus sign before it. So for checking pages that link to site example.com, command would be:
+link: www.example.com
And for checking pages that link to anywhere on site example.com, command would be:
+linkdomain: www.example.com
I am relieved and happy for the fact that this is back since generally backlinks under MSN are even greater than that shown by Yahoo! SiteExplorer.
I didn’t know about this, actually – so thank you for the great information. I will go try it in a conversation with some unsuspecting and poor friends of mine =p haha.
Marty.
Pretty right. I agree with you that google doesn’t report actual backlinks. May be they think they should not give it unnecessary alert value.
Yeah, Yahoo! is nowdays the standard when it comes to checking backlinks. Google does not show proper backlink count. You can rely on MSN linkcount also. They are also as good as Yahoo!
Do you have experience for how MSN stacks up for this? I find Google is useless in this. They under report by a factor of 10. I use yahoo when I am searching for back links. I’ve never used MSN, as i never use them for anything. Are they worth it?