A number of people have asked how I did my 'quick and dirty' survey.

I searched the Internet using Alta Vista's search engine for links to a
particular site, excluding pages from a particular url.

You can see an example if you enter the following text string into your
browsers 'location' field, and hit the return key:

http://altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&what=web&fmt=n&q=link%3Ahtt
p%3A%2F%2Fucmp1.berkeley.edu+and+not+url%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fucmp1.berkeley.edu&r
=&d0=&d1=

The list of Natural History Museums for which I compiled information took
me about 30 minutes to do.  It is very simple and easy.

Go to Alta Vista

http://altavista.digital.com/

Find all links to your site, excluding pages from your own site.
  link:http://my.site.com/ AND NOT url:http://my.site.com/ in Advanced
Query, or
  +link:http://my.site.com/ -url:http://my.site.com/ in Simple Query.
To speed up the search, you can leave out the very common words http and com.

Remember, this doesn't give a measure of the number of 'hits' or requests
for data that a particular server gets, it is a measure of the number of
links to a particular site from other sites.

Jim




Jim Angus
Information Technology and Hypermedia Programs
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
900 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA  90007

voice:  213/744-3317
fax:    213/746-2999
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