Did I Discover Something New about Google?

I noticed something strange with Google today when doing a search to see how many links a site has. As you probably know, you can check how many links Google reports there are to your site by forming your search query like this:

link:www.yourDomain.com

I wanted to check on how many links there were to a site that someone was talking about in another thread, only I accidentally typed "links" instead of "link" so my search query was like this:

links:www.theDomain.com

Notice the "s" at the end of "link" making it plural instead of singular. The search results reported over 58,000 links to the site. Then I removed the "s" to use the right syntax, and Google reported only 180 links.

What the ???

Now, Google tells you the syntax to use is singular: link:whatever

...but that only shows 180 links. When I accidentally used the plural (links:whatever) it showed over 58,000 links.

I went to advanced search and changed it to show 100 results per page. Then I went to the end (Google only shows 1,000 search results no matter how many they say there are) and lo' and behold, the sites on the last page had links to the site in question.

I tried this on one of my own domains too, with the same results. Forming the query like Google tells us to shows 189 links to one of my sites. Forming the query with the plural shows almost 30,000 links to the same site.

Google is notorious for under-reporting links, but unless someone has an explanation for this, I think I just discovered a way to get the truth out of Google, or at least a way to get closer to the truth when it comes to finding how many links a site has to it.

What do you think?