Eytan Seidman, a lead program manager for Live Search, confirmed on the MSNSearch blog that some of the advanced query syntax in the Live Search engine, such as link:, linkdomain:, and inurl: has been turned off, due to "what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining". According to the blog post:
We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve.
The advanced query syntax allowed a query to narrow down information, for example link: would find pages that have links to a given site or domain, so link:live.com would return pages that have links to live.com, linkdomain: would find pages that link to any site in the referenced domain, and inurl: would find pages with a given term in the page's address, so inurl:forums would return pages with forums in its url.