Dear Mary,
A few months ago, I found a formula for one of the search engines, probably Alta Vista, which allowed you to find out all the pages that linked to a particular url. I've forgotten what you had to do, and can't seem to find it again. Can anyone help me, please?
AltaVista does this, go to http://www.altavista.com and for the sites linking to http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~che210 (and sub-pages of that url) you would type into the search box.... link: abdn.ac.uk/~che210 i.e. remove "http://www." from the url. This gives the output AltaVista found about 187 Web pages for you Unfortunately, it isn't totally reliable, but there are various tweaks you can use to get the "correct" answer out of it. Also it is limited to the pages listed in AltaVista. i.e. if a site lists your page, but excludes AltaVista in the robots.txt file, quite obviously it won't be included in AltaVista's output. This is balanced out by the number of pages which supposedly list your site but when you click on the url you get a 404 as the page has moved/died/evolved etc. AltaVista, word has it, rarely revisits pages unless prompted by resubmission. So in most cases AltaVista will underestimate the true number of listings a page has. There are also ways of finding out which pages list "site a" but not "site b" ... which I find handy, as it can give you an idea of where you should be registering your pages. Regards, Michael. -- *------------------------------------------------------------* | Michael H. Barker GRSC The University of Liverpool | | Department of Chemistry | | Tel: +44 151 794 2274 Oxford Street | | Fax: +44 151 794 3588 Liverpool | | L69 7ZD | | E-mail: mhbarker@liv.ac.uk United Kingdom | | | | "Links for Chemists" | | http://www.liv.ac.uk/Chemistry/Links/links.html | *------------------------------------------------------------* chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)