Rand Fishkin has uncovered what he is calling the "Holy Grail" of search operators on MSN. Why is he so excited?

Well, per his example, you can type in:

(linkdomain:kennedyfunding.com linkdomain:hardmoneyfunding.com) (-linkdomain:avatarfinancial.com)

and you will get a list of sites that link to both kennedyfunding.com and hardmoneyfunding.com, but not avatarfinancial.com.

Why does this matter? When you do a search like this, you can find Web sites that could be potential linking partners. It also gives you the ability to see what links might be propelling competitor's sites higher than yours.

Rand has also found that this type of search operator is effective on Yahoo! Search as well - which is great, since many people feel that Yahoo! shows the best results for backlinks.

Of course, if you are too lazy to type in the search operator, you can also use Hub Finder, which does a similar type of search on Yahoo! and/or Google.

Happy link hunting!