Link: vs. Webmaster Tools - Google Corner
Significance of Inbound links are no more new to the web publishers. Inbound links help your site to get stable position in most of the modern search engines. Webmasters, therefore, like to check the number of inbound links pointing to a page.
I would spend hours each day earlier to check for link: operator updates, but over the past one year or more, it does not appear to generate accurate results. Webmasters tool seems to do better a job in reporting inbound links. There are some updates as well in those statistics, might have taken place within past few days.
As I was tremendously busy with customization of a Joomla Template, so, I could not manage time to check out the updates! Anyway, thanks to the news feeds, which keep me updated.
Please check out this.