MSN search advanced operators

Some have already noticed that MSN search engine result pages are pretty similar to Google’s back a couple of years ago, now MSN launches advanced operators for querying its datacenters and retrieve valuable information as far as SEO is concerned.
Soon to come might be a new version of the MSN toolbar featuring a contextual menu such as Google’s “backwardlinks” and Cache.

MSN search users can now enjoy the following new advanced operators:

• Filetype: “document type” This is probably one the most widely used operator. Using the filetype query will let you restrict your search to a certain type of document, such as Microsoft word (doc) or Adobe Acrobat (pdf).
• Inurl: “keyword” Starting a search with this particular query will restrict the result to URL’s including the selected keyword.
• Inanchor: “keyword” Querying MSN search using that query returns WebPages with the highest number of hyperlinks pointing to a particular document.
• Intitle: “keyword” In that case the search is restricted to web pages including the selected key phrase in their title, starting with the most relevant according to the search engines.
• Inbody: “keyword” The equivalent of Google’s Allintext operator returns the most relevant document including the selected keyword in its body text. For those less familiar with the SEO world, this operator might appear irrelevant but the fact is that only from link popularity a website could appear on top of search engines without even including the keyword in its pages which is sometimes frustrated for the searcher.
• Link: “page url” Query would find documents pointing to a particular page.
• Linkdomain: “domain url” is an extension of the previous operator but for a whole domain.
• Contains: “document type” When searching using the “contains” operator MSN search would return web pages that include a hyperlink to a specific document type, word for example (doc).

Still very useful and missing on MSN is “define: keyword” for example, a query returning definitions of the given key word and a few others.
MSN search won’t give up and is committed to providing the most useful and relevant search engine following Google’s example. It will be interesting to see if MSN will give access to its database to developers through an API such as Google and develop its brand awareness utilizing the developer community. For now searchers and SEO’s and online marketers will enjoy double checking Google’s data through MSN search operators.