Every blogger wants to keep track of who is linking to their blog and
to a particular entry. The blog search engines like Technorati,
BlogPulse, IceRocket, Bloglines and Feedster can give bloggers a list
of inbound links to a particular url. Blogger John Walkenbach, at the
J-Walk blog,
reports on a test he conducted where he requested bloggers to link
to a specific blog post of his so that he could later check and see if he could find all of the incoming links. The results were that J-Walk was able to find about 85% of the incoming links and that the different blog search tools gave very different results.
At least 132 bloggers linked to that experimental blog entry, and I
identified 114 of them -- for a "find" rate of 85%. It's extremely
likely, however, that other unfound links exist, and the blog owners
simply haven't checked back to tell me. Therefore, my actual success
rate is probably closer to 80%.
MSN Search provided the largest number of responses. A chart
showing his success with each search engine can be found
here.
One option J-Walk Blog left out would be to use the URL Search Smart Feed service from Newsgator which might have caught a few more (currently free for one URL). It is a big surprise that MSN Search took the lead in J-Walk's test. The blog search tools give different results because of the different ways they index feeds. The blog search engines also do not index all of the same feeds. And bloggers may not always ping each one of the blog search engines.
