Why? Google only displays UK links & hides other global backlinks

Backlinks display problem for a ".co.uk" website:

A UK-based friend asked me to help him in the following:

HE has a companyname.co.uk (not his real website name) website which is over 8 years old and being a leader in its industry, has thousands of backlinks from all over the world, most are incoming-only links from good related sites.

The problem is that Google only displays the UK backlinks and not backlinks originated from other countries when searched for (checked both Google.com and Google.co.uk -- same problem):


But when I searched for the same string with enclosing quotes (which his team never thought of doing), it showed thousands of backlinks from all over the world:
Is this difference and google's limitation because of the extra "dot" in the url? Like ".co.uk", is this a Google bug?

Thank you all!

How many backlinks is g reporting back? If only a few, it is probably due to g backlink searches in general. You need to use something more effective like yahoo site explorer.

BTW, searching for link:"company.co.uk" is the same as searching for "company.co.uk link". It will just search for the word "link" and for the domain.

G(UK & com) is reporting only about 70 backlinks - all are .co.uk sites, all are from UK (of course ), and none are displayed that are other tld extensions (like org, com, net, etc). But the above link-term in quotes is showing more than 5.5k (just checked these), which is true... because, the site itself is a growing authority site, and is becoming a leader in UK. It's online for a sufficiently long time. And we know that many of the overseas customers and others are linking back - definite on this. Many of those from outside UK who we know are linking to our site are showing up in the search with quotes, and not in search w/o quotes.

I even tried giving it a link from blogger a few days back, and gave another link to one of my own sites from that same blogger page (my site is a dot com, which is also based on a UK server). The link to my .com site shows in G, but does not to the .co.uk


P.S.: If I put "www.companyname.co.uk link" ('companyname' replaced by the real company name) in G, it doesn't display anything. Of course, link:"company.co.uk" is NOT the same as searching for "company.co.uk link". Sorry.

If you put "" it also return strings and not only LIVE links.