Backlink checker for Ask.com

Every engine has it, why not ask.com?

[Lisa]

It seems wierd that Ask.com would not have a backlink checker. Of all the engines it is the only one not to have this feature. Does anyone have a trick for finding out this information or are they really that lame.

[BillyS]

>>Does anyone have a trick for finding out this information or are they really that lame.

They're not lame at all. And yes, there is a way - no tricks necessary.

It upsets me to see posts about Ask being lame - they are far from it. I tried a very complex query the other day - Google wasn't even close in figuring out what I was looking for. Ask was spot on.

Spend some time on Ask, you'll see that finding what you're looking for is very simple.

[tedster]

I agree that Ask is far from lame -- but in this case, I don't think Ask does have a way for users to check for links to another domain.

They have the VERY useful inlink: operator that returns only pages that have your search terms in anchor text. But as far as I can see, there's no way to get a list of links no matter what the anchor element contains. That doesn't mean they don't know, because they clearly do -- their "ExpertRank" algorithm is very dependent on linking patterns to identify various web communites.

Whether this is any more lame than Google's partial display of just a few links is another thing. Both engines have algos that are very sensitive to link information - they don't want to enable reverse engineering.