Shodan does not hide results. It is legal because it only indexes publicly accessible banners. However, Shodan does not respect robots.txt and is often used by both security professionals and cybercriminals.

A common file structure for these cameras was: http://[camera-ip]/axis-cgi/multi.html

Thus, inurl:multi html intitle:webcam was the perfect recipe. The extra word "link" was added later to filter for pages that explicitly contained hyperlinks to individual video streams (like mpeg4/video.cgi ).