It seems to me that the next level of search engine technology ought to tackle the issue of backward links in a new way. Google currently does a piss-poor job of it. When I do a search for site which link back to mine, using the string: link:www.timboucher.com, it has the nerve to mostly serve me links which originate from elsewhere within my domain name. It’s retarded.
Tools like technorati are slightly better, if only because they provide more up-to-the-minute search results. If I do a search on there to see which weblogs are linking to mine it provides me a halfway decent list. But I happen to know that it’s woefully incomplete, thanks to being able to cross-reference it with my server referral logs, and websites which I happen to know link to me. Also, technorati only includes weblogs in its search.
The other thing that I would want out of a search engine technology, besides the full-featured backward links lookup, is the ability to quickly see what webpages provide commentary on the one that I’m currently looking at. Like say I’m reading an article on Wired, I want a google-quick up-to-the-moment listing of everyone who has additional content directly linked to this article. Technorati can be useful for this at times, as can some of the other weblog trend lookup services. But I’m still here having to cobble together results from a bunch of different sources in order to come up with even a small portion of the functionality that I’m really looking for.
To put it more succintly, the way the web currently works is through forward links. These are links which the author of a webpage has chosen which point to additional resources. Backwards links are created by people other than the webpage author. The webpage author will only ever include a certain number of forward links according to their bias. A comprehensive backward link system would allow you to escape the bias of the author in the discovery of supplementary resources.
As I see it, this is one of the main areas of web technology that stands poised to be expanded and exploited. If I were an intrepid young entrepeneur with a start-up mentality, this is one of the prime areas I would concentrate my efforts in.
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