Live.com’s linkfromdomain Operator

Most people are pretty familiar with Google’s Advanced Search Operators. You can use them to more preciously search for web pages or particular data. Anyway, earlier today I discovered that Microsoft’s search engine, live.com, has an amusingly useful search operator that Google doesn’t have. It’s called linkfromdomain. Now, this isn’t new news. I did some Googling and the operator has been around since late 2006, however, since not very many people use live.com, I figured some of you might find this info useful.

The linkfromdomain operator allows you to search the websites that a particular website links to. For example, if you search for “linkfromdomain:patorjk.com“, you’d get a list of all of the sites I link to throughout this website. At first glance this may not seem that useful, however, it allows you to ask some interesting questions as an individual and as a webmaster. Here are some examples:

I don’t think Google currently has the ability to answer any of those questions, which is a little surprising. Anyway, there are probably lots of other neat questions you can form using the linkfromdomain operator. It’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re surfing the web.