"link:" searches

[Danny Sullivan]

> As an aside, the strange results noted by others for Alta Vista in
> recent posts also exist for Alta Vista "link:" searches, which is
> one reason I'm evaluating other engines as well.  Also, the three
> mentioned engines retrieve significantly different pages, with
> Infoseek retrieving far fewer than the other two. 

The search engines will retrieve different pages because they all 
have slightly different indices.

Given AltaVista's long standing problem with counts, HotBot is 
probably your best choice. It's a good crawler, the counts stay 
stable and it has the largest collection of web documents.

FYI, I have a page about doing link searches at:
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/popularity.html

cheers,
danny


-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan 
Editor, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com