

Ask HN: Best way to see who's linking to a URL? - brandnewlow

Technorati has their Cosmos API, but that only returns results when both linker and linkee are in Technorati.  For some of the topics I'm creating memetrackers for, this isn't always the case.<p>Are there any other services like that out there?<p>What would rolling my own look like?
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brandnewlow
Sorry. I think I totally botched this post.

I'm looking for a way to automatically look up any sites linking to a given
URL.

I'm building a memetracker and while I've got the related stories and clumping
of them in hand, tracking down the discussion links in the way that Techmeme
does it is proving much harder to do.

I was wondering if there was a way to do it other than Cosmos. And if not,
what would be involved in creating something that does that? Building a web
spider?

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mikeyur
I think Techmeme just crawls the sites in their 'network' for cross-linking.
For example Techmeme has TechCrunch/Ars/Engadget/Scobleizer/etc in their
network and if they link within each other then that pushes the story up
higher (again, not 100% sure, just making an assumption based on what I've
seen).

I don't think there is a real-time way to see how many sites are linking to
another unless they're being crawled quite often by google/yahoo/technorati OR
you have a script installed on their site to see the inbound links and gauge
traffic.

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pmorici
You mean like Google?

Use the syntax "link:[http://www.someurl.com/"](http://www.someurl.com/)

~~~
brandnewlow
That appears to return no results for URLs that are returning results using
the Technorati api. I think that feature is meant more for base-level domains
rather than specific URLs.

~~~
pmorici
likely because it takes time for something to get into the Google index.

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dmaclay
<http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com>

