How does Google present the links when I do a 'link:www.domain.com' search? Does it do it by page rank? Cheers.
It's a random sample. Meaning it is entirely useless for any purpose you might have. Try Yahoo instead.
It might be listed by the latest links google found for the site. The sites are not listed by page rank.
Forget about the link: operator, It's entirely pointless and will not give you any kind of accurate result. If you want to know all the links google know about use the google webmaster tools and click the "links" tab.
Actually, from one update to the next they do stay in the same order, so it is ranked by something. Only time it varies is if a site they counted goes supp or disappears altogether. That's why you can reliably set up a Google Alerts to watch your link: query and get notified when an update occurs. My guess would be that it is done using an arbitrary primary key id, perhaps set when the link was associated with your site in the latest update, in order of when that association was made. As tfbpa said, not meaningful in any useful way, but interesting, in a really geeky kind of way. -Michael
Google just display a small portion of your links. If you want to see the real number of your backlinks create an account in google webmaster tools.
google "link" command is not useless. IT takes into account all of your links and displays around 10% of it. I don't know why they do that. Maybe to spare some resources...maybe they like it this way or maybe ....who the hell knows. Google links are accurate, when they have been recently updated. The bad thing is that they get updated once in 2-3 months. Basically if google shows 100 links for your site. This means that it takes into account maybe 1000-1500 links. Yahoo shows all the stuff, but it does not filter the links which have no weigh, while imo google does that. cheers, nik