12 Jan 2005

MSN Search Beta Better

If you’re curious about who’s linking to your site, services such as Technorati are great for checking weblogs, but you need to turn to conventional search engines to cover the rest.

Searching for inbound links via Google (using the link: prefix) has always been frustrating. For some reason the links seem to lag weeks or months behind indexed content and produce unusually-small numbers of results.

Today I tried out the MSN Search beta. It found 259 inbound links for my home page, compared with Google’s 26. Although many are from ‘spammy’ fake portals the results are still far more comprehensive.

A tiny percentage of people use such options, but they also tend to be the kinds of users who originally spread the word about Google, so it’s perhaps not a good idea to let geekier features slip too far behind rivals’.