Microsoft’s Live Search team have come up with a really cool piece of code (a search macro, in their terminology) which allows you to search a sub-group of sites all of whom are linked from a particular site. (A similar piece of code already allows you to track sites that link to a particular site) This is a very useful tool for a director of marketing or communications who wants to track the progress of an idea. O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest writes it up.
Really useful stuff. Kudos to Microsoft.  As Joseph Hunkins pointed out, this is out-Googling Google.

It resonates with a lot of the interesting work we have been doing here at Market Sentinel. One of our observations is that a series of contextual links create what is, in effect, a focus group on a specific issue. Not a normal focus group, but an opted-in focus group, a focus group of experts.

The effects of this are very intriguing. For example we did some work recently looking at developments in social search. We found that we could look at the sites that were being disproportionately linked by the stakeholders in this topic – and realised that they were consistently identifying cutting edge technology developments ahead of the mainstream media. If I was working for a VC, or a technology company on the hunt for acquisitions, this would be information that would be of great interest to me.
via John Battelle