Who is linking to my website?

It turns out very few people are aware of advanced search operators provided by all the major search engines. Fewer still actually bother to use them.

However, in certain situations, they tend to be very handy.

If I want to find out who is linking to my blog, for example, I just have to use the link: operator. I can ofcourse search within this set of pages by adding search terms to the query.

If I want to see who all are linking to an entire domain, there is the linkdomain: operator.

Want to search the set of pages that provide RSS/Atom feeds? Use the hasfeed: operator.

Then there is ofcourse the site: operator, that lets you restrict a search to a specific site.

There are many more - see this page for a complete list of operators currently supported by MSN / Windows Live Search.

Ofcourse, many people are probably too lazy to type in an operator while searching for something. But sometimes, they help you get the result you are looking for faster, rather than repeating searches with various keyword combinations. There is also the macros feature I wrote about in my last post that lets you save away search modifiers for convenient reuse and sharing with friends.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2006
  Now if only they would add the NEAR operator to cull results like MSDN has..  
  
  I'd like to find matches "near" each other..something like within 10% of the document or within 10 lines or whatever..
  
  e.g. "jmp NEAR genomics NEAR microarray"
  e.g. "SetWindowPos NEAR disappear"
  you get the idea...
  
  John
  

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2006
  Thanks for the suggestion John. We are working on improving our query operator set and adding new capabilities - I will note your feature request.

• Anonymous
  January 15, 2007
  Where can I go to see who is linking to my site?

• Anonymous
  January 18, 2007
  Josh - just use the link or linkdomain operator in Live Search. For example: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=linkdomain%3Ablogs.msdn.com&mkt=en-us&FORM=LVSP