Comments on: Alternative frenzy of renown

By: Backword Dave

Backword Dave — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:27:47 +0000

Eszter, the reason Technorati is quick is because most blog software pings technorati on each new post. I really can't see why it would take half an hour; it should be (nearly) instantaneous. Since Google uses pings of weblogs.com and (presumably) technorati (see Google blogsearch help), it should be equally quick. I was going to test this by finding a recently updated blog on weblogs.com, but they all look like spam blogs to me, and the last CT post was a few hours ago, which isn't much help. Still, an experiment shouldn't be beyond the wit of other readers.

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:48:45 +0000

Sorry—I think I included a hyphen that broke everything (“preview” notwithstanding).

[Fixed, but may no longer work as a link! CB]

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:47:05 +0000

Eszter, I think the "link:" operator counts specific pages as well as the top-level domain. If I search for link:cosmicvariance.com, I get 600 entries, most of which are pointing to specific pages rather than the top page of the blog. If I search for "cosmic variance" - site:cosmicvariance.com, I also get about 600 entries; but if I search for link:cosmicvariance.com -site:cosmicvariance.com, I get nothing. And not because all of our links are from ourselves!

By: yabonn

yabonn — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 22:11:32 +0000

the relationship between the English “wicket” and the French “guichet”

Forehead, palm.

Let me try to compound the coolness – at least for the few francophones that may be lurking around – the serendipity post mentions the Tlfi, an incrediblygoodalicious free french online dictionary. “I don’t need anymore my 10 kilos paper dico” kind of good.

If you’re man enough for all the diacritics, that is.

By: Eszter

Eszter — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 22:03:11 +0000

By the way, no need to add the “http://”, just say site:xyz.abc or -site:xyz.abc depending on whether you want it included or not.

Sean, could the reason for the discrepancy be that the “link:” feature works with specific URLs? So if you’re running a query on link:crookedtimber.og then that query may miss out on links to specific blog pages, no? Or did I misunderstand what you were doing?

By: Eszter

Eszter — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 19:56:47 +0000

Curious, I get very similar results running the same search on Technorati. Technorati has been known to have blog posts indexed within half an hour. Does anyone know how long Google takes?

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:55:26 +0000

I’m a little baffled. It should be much simpler just to search for “link:crookedtimber.org”, as here. Then you catch people who link to you without using the phrase “Crooked Timber” (which might be a substantial fraction).

Two weird problems: first, if you try to include “-site:http://crookedtimber.org/“, which should find posts that link to you but aren’t on your own blog, the search returns nothing. Second, as a matter of fact, the search you’ve set up finds lots of posts that the “link:” tag doesn’t, even if they are clearly linking to you (700 my way, over 3,000 your way). Funny.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 17:44:35 +0000

And I found something cool straight away, namely, this discussion href=”http://serendipity.lascribe.net/ling-lang/2005/12/wicket-guichet” rel=”nofollow”>http://serendipity.lascribe.net/ling-lang/2005/12/wicket-guichet of the relationship between the English “wicket” and the French “guichet”.