Webometric Analyst needs Microsoft Key

Webometric Analyst now needs a Microsoft key to access Bing searches and you are allowed 5,000 "pages" of up to 100 results per month. Please see the Webometric Analyst home page for details.

The online Yahoo Web Search API service has closed down, stopping the link searches in LexiURL from working. Webometric Analyst has replaced LexiURL Searcher - it can still run link searches but instead of counting hyperlinks, it counts either URL citation links or title mention links - see the web site for more information.

LexiURL Searcher is designed to submit large numbers of queries to Live Search, Yahoo! or (possibly) Google automatically via their permitted interfaces. This helps Webometric investigations by removing a significant part of the manual labour when retrieving large numbers of results. LexiURL Searcher will put all the results into a file and then either process it, allow you to process it with LexiURL, or allow you to import the data into a spreadsheet. http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk/help/UsingGoogleAPI.htm

I've decided to keep up-to-date information about syntax for commercial search engine searches in one place http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/QueriesForWebometrics.htm but will post in this blog about changes.
The most important change in the last year was the Live Search withdrawal of all link search operators except for linkfromdomain: (thanks David for spotting this). Yahoo!/AltaVista/AllTheWeb is the only remaining search engine family with significant link search capabilities - Google has only a weak version of the link: search and Live Search has nothing.
[Finally found my login details for this blog. Doh!]

I've just been experimenting with Windows Live searches (via the MSN Search Web Services programming interface) and produced results which surprised me, although they are quite logical in a way.
It seems that for queries with many results (e.g. 8,000+) the hit counts reported by the search engine tend to be estimates for the number of matching URLs (and are probably slight overestimates of about 20% too high). For queries with few results (e.g., 500-) after eliminating duplicates, near duplicates (similar snippets displayed in the results) and multiple URLs from the same site. Hence high hit counts tend to measure something different to low hit counts! This may be the same for other search engines too.

Microsoft's Windows live search http://www.msn.com/ or http://www.live.com/ seems to be the most powerful search tool for webometrics now - follow the link below for its help pages. See the section on keywords in particular.

http://help.live.com/(bWFya2V0PWVuLVVTJnByb2plY3Q9V0xfU2VhcmNodjE=)/Help.aspx?querytype=topic&query=WL_SEARCH_REF_AdvancedSearch.htm&fs=1

The LexiURL web site is now live. This is software for the link analysis of large lists of pages or links, including downloading and processing link data from commercial search engines (via their public 'API' interface).

The Wikimetrics blog is brilliant! Packed full of interesting results and discussions.
http://wm.sieheauch.de/

Microsoft search allows multiple combined advanced searches
The search
linkdomain:wlv.ac.uk linkdomain:virginia.edu
-site:wlv.ac.uk -site:virginia.edu
is a combination of four advanced searches - including two exlusion type searches. The Microsoft search results for this appear to correctly include only pages that match all criteria. In contrast, Google does not allow its link search to be combined with anything else. The equivalent can be achieved with AltaVista as follows
linkdomain:wlv.ac.uk AND linkdomain:virginia.edu
NOT host:wlv.ac.uk host:virginia.edu

The above two examples are a search for site co-inlinks for wlv.ac.uk and virginia.edu. In other words matching pages (a) link to the University of Wolverhampton AND the University of Virginia, and (b) are not from either of these two universities.
This is brilliant for giving webometric statistics like co-inlink counts. The limitation of returning only about 250 matches per search is a problem if you really want the URLs of all matching pages rather than just the number of matching pages.

The Microsoft results are significant for Webometrics becuase, as David Stuart has pointed out, the Microsoft API (a tool for computer programmers) gives the same results as the main Microsoft search engine, unlike the Yahoo API (which effectively is also the AltaVista API), which gives less matches. Hence the Microsoft version seems to be better for the automatic calculation of link counts.