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Why does "link:" followed by a space give me more results on Google?

When I use the Google link: feature and I type a URL immediately after the colon (no space), I get far fewer results than when I separate the colon and the URL with one space or multiple spaces.

I also seem to get many more relevant results on the first set of page results when I type a space after the colon.

I just was curious as to why their is a discrepancy.

Dave's Answer:

If you search for

link:intuitive.com

then you only get sites that link to intuitive.com (though there's reason to beileve you don't get 100% accurate info from Google because they mask some of the input used for their PageRank and Search Engine Placement algorithms).

If you search for

link: intuitive.com

Then you're essentially really searching for

link intuitive.com

and you'll get more matches, but they're different because the "link:" predicate is ignored....

I hope that clarifies the situation for you!

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