Difference between link to and contain

Google has

Find web pages that link to www............
Find web pages that contain the term www...............

I've never bothered looking into the difference, but I notice that a Skaffe.com reference to my site is under 'contain' not 'link' - yet it seems to have a direct link in the HTML

In another case, it shows I have 27 links to my site, but for one of the domains shown linking to me, there are actaully hundreds of links that have been there for over a year, but it shows only two of them.

On another case -- web pages that contain www.xxxxyyyy.com is 375, but that includes the website itself - so it would seem the number should be lower

If I search for "www.xxxxyyyy.com -site:www.xxxxyyyy.com to exclude my own site I get a higher number - 646

 

Remember that Google doesn't show all the links it knows about with the "link:" command.

 

I seem to remember if a link is less than PR4 or something it will not show up in a link:www.domain.com search.

 

That may have been true at some point, but from what I can tell they just show a random assortment of links.

 

I can not fully agree with this. But, good quality links are most likely to be considered i guess