When you browse to a web site you've never seen before, you
don't have very much advance knowledge about the site. You might know that
you've followed a link from a particular site that you read frequently, or you
might have found the site in some search results for a certain search term. Of
course, the site itself can tell you quite a bit, but that still doesn't give
you any clues about where the site fits into the larger Web. With some searching
at Yahoo!, you can get extra info about a site by using the special
link: syntax.
If you want to find what sites are linking to any other
particular site, you can browse to http://search.yahoo.com and enter this query: link:insert URL.
Instead of standard
search results, Yahoo! will display a list of the sites that link to the URL
you've specified in the query. For example, if you'd like to find out where the
O'Reilly Hacks site fits into the Web, you could search for link:http://hacks.oreilly.com.
In the results, you immediately get a sense of how many pages
link to the site and what kinds of sites are linking there. If you're browsing
the Web, leaving a site to do a quick Yahoo! link: search can be
annoying if you'd just like to get this sense about the current site you're
visiting. To find the sites, you need to copy the current URL from your browser
address bar, open a new window or tab, browse to Yahoo!, and then assemble the
proper query. It's a quick process, but you can speed it up considerably with a
bit of classic ASP and a JavaScript bookmarklet.
This hack uses JavaScript to get the URL of the current page
you're viewing in your browser. From there, it passes the URL to a server-side
script that assembles the proper Yahoo! query and fetches the top 10 results
with Yahoo! Search Web Services. A new pop-up window will give a quick look at
which sites are linking to the current page, without leaving your place.