The director of The Committee to Protect Bloggers (for whom I am a technical consultant) sent me an email tonight asking what the best way to find inbound links to their blog was. The results of my investigation were so interesting to me that I thought I’d post the email I sent in response.
How many inbound links total, like to tell people “we’re linked to by this many sites”? I am thrilled to say that the best way to find out is NOT to search in Google for link:http://committeetoprotectbloggers.civiblog.org (455 results). Strange as this might seem, I am happy to report that Microsoft’s search (MSN Search, http://search.msn.com) comes back with 15,525 results. And they look pretty damned valid. Update: As of the middle of the night MSN search is now up to 17,500+ results for this search.) Now I am certainly no fan of Microsoft, but it is a happy day for me when I can say that the best search engine for your particular need is NOT Google. Unfortunately, the “blog search” engines all suck…some so bad that I emailed them asking what’s up.
So if I’m understanding your question right, I’d say in this case to use MSN Search and tell people that the NEW CPB site has been linked to 15,525 times as of this most recent search.
If you look at the MSN results you’ll note that a large number of them are from blogs, so why do these supposed “blog search” engines not find these links? Is this related to the fact that my traffic monitor is a much better way to find who’s linking to me than are Technorati, PubSub and Feedster combined?
You know what the coolest thing is? There’s an RSS feed available for MSN Search results for web search. Who else offers RSS feeds of their search results – not of news, or of blogs, but of the whole web. Nobody I know. You have to use 3rd party, subscription based GoogleAlerts.com to get an RSS feed of Google web search results. If I can get this from MSN search, do I need Technorati?
I swear I really am cheering for Web 2.0, but I’ve been super frustrated with some performance issues lately. Just to balance out the complaining, I’ll tell you I’ve been having great experiences with Newsgator (for RSS reading), Blinkx.com (for podcast search) and Del.icio.us for rebound lovin’ post breakup with Furl.net, who hasn’t returned my email or blog post – despite some one from parent company LookSmart having a Firefox tab open on this article (Furl, I Can’t Take it Anymore!) for 5 hours today. But I’m not all about complaints!
Technorati Tags: MSNSearch, Google, Search, Blogs, Blog_Search, RSS, Web2.0, CommitteeToProtectBloggers