Why doesn't Google show all referring links?

link popularity

[Arnett]

When I check a url's referring links Google will say that it is showing 1-x of 2x links. Why don't all the referring links display?

[AmericanBulldog]

only links with PR4 or higher are shown, however, all links are taken into consideration in calculating PR

[Quinn]

Arnett,

I think if you look to the bottom of the page you'll find a link that allows you to search again with the omitted pages (similar pages) included. That being said you can still only get the first 900 some results out of possibly thousands....millions..

[vitaplease]

The question is relevant. Why not show all links? Yet another feature that leads to Pageranked hyped link hunting.

[jeremy goodrich]

The system resources would be a primary concern...Google is all about providing a fast search.

People searching for backlinks -> aren't really using the primary purpose for which Google was built, ya?

So I doubt they would allocate more resources to it than they had to :)

[Quinn]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this.

I think there may be two seperate conversations going on...

I had thought that it was showing all of Arnett's backlinks. For a PR3 or lower it doesn't ever give

showing 1-x of 2x

It will say

Your search - link:http://www.domain.com/ - did not match any documents.

So in Arnett's situation it is probably showing him almost all of the backlinks.

Except for what it consider "similar".

[vitaplease]

jeremy,

valid reason, I understand they do not show all Yahoo's backlinks, nor do they show all search results but limit them to 1000 or so.

However, would it be such a strain to show Joe Blow's 20 PR2-3 backlinks?

Is Alltheweb so much slower by showing them?

[netguy]

You can also get an idea how many inbound links you have by typing in acmewidgets OR "www.acmewidgets.com" in quotes to see the links if you're checking a PR3 or less site.

Never use the total Google results number though, go to the last page and see the true number of links indexed.

[jeremy goodrich]

Alltheweb probably gets little to no searches for those, in comparison to searches on Google for backlinks.

Keep in mind, Alltheweb has only a small, small fraction of the total search volume of Google.

So they amount of 'system resources' they need to run their entire operation is probably miniscule, by comparison.

Since nobody (relatively speaking...) is searching there, it consumes 'hardly any' resources, imho. :)