LexiURL Searcher is designed to submit large numbers of queries to Live Search, Yahoo! or (possibly) Google automatically via their permitted interfaces. This helps Webometric investigations by removing a significant part of the manual labour when retrieving large numbers of results. LexiURL Searcher will put all the results into a file and then either process it, allow you to process it with LexiURL, or allow you to import the data into a spreadsheet. http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk/help/UsingGoogleAPI.htm

I've decided to keep up-to-date information about syntax for commercial search engine searches in one place http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/QueriesForWebometrics.htm but will post in this blog about changes.
The most important change in the last year was the Live Search withdrawal of all link search operators except for linkfromdomain: (thanks David for spotting this). Yahoo!/AltaVista/AllTheWeb is the only remaining search engine family with significant link search capabilities - Google has only a weak version of the link: search and Live Search has nothing.
[Finally found my login details for this blog. Doh!]