Last week I asked What would be a good way to find all (blog) pages linking to a specific blog post? and received some suggestions. I’m going to do an experiment and test all of them for finding links to a specific post.
For example, I’d like to find who links to my old post which is at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/23.html#a849. There are 9 trackbacks from external weblogs pointing to this post. Let’s see what other tools give (in alphabetical order; links from my own weblog are excluded):
Blogdex – 6 (This is a complicated case: it doesn’t show permalinks, only links to blogs and dates; 5 referrals come with wrong dates. Interesting that it gives one referral which is not in trackbacks.)
Blogdigger link search – 0 (Update: 1 external link – see comments to this post)
Update: Bloglines – 9 (see note at the end of this post)
Blogrunner – 0 (Goes back 3 month max.)
Feedster – 0 (I was suggested to use fields for advanced search, but coudn’t figure out how.)
Google – 2 (after cleaning all links from my own weblog :)
Technorati – 0 (It shows 2 links but I wasn’t able to trace referring posts. Indexes links from homepages only.)
Waypath Link References Search – 0 (This feature is beta. As far as I know Waypath database goes back 45 days.)
The obvious winner is Blogdex. It found most and even 1 link that wasn’t in trackbacks, but if you think that you can use it to trace follow-ups for a post, you are wrong: you don’t have links to referring posts, so you have to go to a weblog and dig out archives (and you’d better Google search them as dates are wrong :). Anyway, given that in his paper Cameron Marlow says that Blogdex is moving from opt-in to opt-out indexing system, the future gives a bit of hope…
If you have a tool that gives better results, please, let me know – you can be the winner then :)
Just a bit later: Piers Young and Matt Whyndham on “unhealthy (=no depth) fixation with now-ness” and short memories in the blogosphere. Joining them wondering why most of the tools allow only searching recent stuff…
One more update: thanks to Stephan Mosel the winner title goes to Bloglines with 9 links from outside :)
Tags: blog conversationsArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/06/07.html#a1231; comments are here.
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