OK. Murph from Baltimore, Maryland asks: “Seeing as how the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your preferred or favorite way to be, to check for inbound links if you were a webmaster?”.
Well, I've explained this before but the “link:” operator is accurate, it only shows you a subsample of your links. So my preferred way would be to log in to Google's Webmaster Tools and we will show you a very exhaustive list of all your backlinks; pretty much all the backlinks that we know of, in Google's Webmaster Console.
The nice thing is, other people can't spy on that. So your competitor can't look at your backlinks. You can start to see some backlinks for other sites, Yahoo!'s Site Explorer for example. If you type in a URL into Yahoo!'s Site Explorer – just their search box – you can explore backlinks a little bit that way.
So those are a couple tools that you can use. But again, it's not that we show wrong links, it's just that we don't show all of the links that we know of. So there's a lot of different options that you have to find out more about backlinks for different websites.