ATW New Feature : Url Investigator

[Brett_Tabke]

Quietly buried in the thread on AllTheWeb's new design [webmasterworld.com] is a new feature to look at information around a specific site.

[alltheweb.com...]

Notice the new links ATW provides:

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Find all 37,681 external web pages that link to "http://www.webmasterworld.com"
Find all 983 external web pages that contain the term "http://www.webmasterworld.com"
Find all 46,636 web pages indexed under "http://www.webmasterworld.com"
Discover who owns "webmasterworld.com"
See how "www.webmasterworld.com" used to look

[Tor]

Excellent Brett! This is really a cool feature. ;)

[Rumbas]

Whoa! I had not noticed that in the 'design' thread before caine tipped me off.

Surely helps digging into a site doesn't it? For me personally it's great as I tend to forget all those syntaxes and it's so nice that you can see "who owns this site", historic info etc. I also like the FAST FACTS box on the right (language, last updated and doc size). What more can you ask for?

I agree, FAST has once again outdone themselves.

[EliteWeb]

Saw that yesterday but figured that it was something already posted about here since i dont use ATW all the time -- and look there it is! ;) It did look neat, tells ya all the information is a nice easy step. Links to archive.org, whois information and backlink count :D

[JustTrying]

It would be pretty difficult to get better than that. Great find!

[heini]

Yeah, we had that discussed merged into the new design, rolled out on 4 March.
BTW: it's officially dubbed as Url Investigator.

Immediate reactions were somewhat mixed feelings. This feature serves as a great reminder on what the SEs know and see about sites, web structures, and site owners.

Of course, there's hardly any magic in it. The informations have all been there for the taking before.

Nonetheless bundling this into a handy feature for the public is another step into making the web more transparent.

[visca]

Thanks waybackmachine! Now I can see how truly aweful my old web site designs looked 4 years ago. :P Looking at it positively though, web designers can look at it as a way of seeing their improvement over the years. The storage requirements to hold so many copies of so many sites (graphics and all) over the years must be staggering.

About the ownership feature, I'm suprised by now none of the many engines that show your whois data as the sites ownership don't cross reference that information with other sources to make it a more informative feature.

[JeremyL]

Can't believe you all didn't notice before. I thought everyone knew. This feature actually caused me to switch my homepage from google to ATW. Of course the fact I still have the google toobar installed make it like google was still my homepage :)

[caine]

I only spotted it earlier on, as i made ATW my homepage on IE, and was buggering around, upto something.

Then all this info came back which i found so informative.

[turk182]

Visca

The storage requirements to hold so many copies of so many sites (graphics and all) over the years must be staggering

I think they don't store images, or at least they don't do it for my site. I think they load them directly from it, and because I've deleted almost all of them, I see only text for my old designs.

[xcandyman]

They have kept a lot of my old images from my old sites. Its seems pretty random though what it picks up and what it dosnt.

Steve

[visca]

Yeah some of the graphics show up while others don't. Probably depends on size of the graphic, whether it has ALT tags, etc. The completeness of the graphics it stores increases as it moves along the time line.. 1999 graphics were very sparce, while 2000 had many of the graphics and pages stored. I no longer have ANY of these graphics on my servers, so they must be storing them there.

[richardb]

Thanks for that Brett

I had missed that

"Create a Search Button
By adding this "magic" bookmark to your bookmarks list or Links Toolbar, you can search AlltheWeb with a single click.

Make sure your Links Toolbar is being displayed by checking Links under Toolbar in the View menu.
Place your mouse pointer over the "Search AlltheWeb"...blar, blar, blar

But why haven't they got a Tool Bar al la Google? There cannot be many people visiting WWW who don't have it installed. It's a lovely (and quite useful)add on for those of us who are too lazy to go to favouraites or type in :)

Rich

[awcabot]

Google has a similar feature: type in the URL of a web page and it spits out:

Google's cache
Similar pages
Backlinks
Pages that contain the exact URL

Alltheweb's has in addition a whois lookup and a wayback machine reference.

[caine]

This goes way further than what google is offering.

for example, search a url out on google, then look at the back links. Then put the url with a prominent keyterm, that will insure that google is delivering everything connected to them terms, and then you will see a heck of a lot more incoming links to site's. Whether it is deliberate by google, or an oversight in the algo construction - it exists.

On the other hand - what ATW is offering is a multi-tier capture of all the links by url association or by key word / brand / url content mentioning - in a sense a authoritative hub - similar in essence to Teoma's expert links algo.

Furthermore, it's the page listings for a url, especially when their is a mismatch in numbers, which illustrates so much about ATW crawl cycle (db farm update's) and also the Spam detectors, that are in use, that are taking out pages with similar content.

All in all - this will definetly become part of my SEO toolbox. ATW shine by this move

[jatar_k]

I have been using it religiously since that last thread. It really does provide some very interesting tools and a very interesting look at any given site. ATW is my first stop for info on sites now.

I told you, grumble, no one listens to the programmer, grumble .... ;)

[caine]

> I told you, grumble, no one listens to the programmer, grumble

there, there.

don't worry they will be drooling over your knowledge at the conference, unfortunatly - i can't imagine why you would want that.

[mil2k]

Yes i have been using ATW since the last thread. Kind of like other options. The good thing about this thread is that whoever missed that first one has caught up with others. And as always when Bret says something the WebmasterWorld listens.

[Trodda]

My word, that is interesting. Good one, Brett.

I'm a little confused though. How is it that ATW shows 10000's of links that link back to my site, and Google only shows a hundred or so? Does Google only index links that are presented in a certain way?

[Rumbas]

>ATW shows links that Google doesn't

Trodda, Google has a threashold for showing links to a site. A page used to have aaound PR4 to show in backward links.

Maybe FAST is just really good at finding links? ;)

[chiyo]

Is anybody seeing any significance in the ORDER of the "backlinks" presentation?

It looks to me very much like its ordered by the "importance" of the sites with links to the site in question. Not PR of course, but something maybe related to link popularity or "authority".

Not really looked very seriously at it, someone else may have?

[Trodda]

Thanks Rumbas. I had a closer look a some of the links and found a few PR 4's that didn't appear to be in Google. Dare I say it, but is FAST crawling better than Google?