> > Has anyone written a robot which maintains a cross-reference of which pages
> > link to which other ones? Better yet, are there any search engines which
> > will allow searches by link other than AltaVista?
>
> There is a tool named Web Core that displays the reverse links for a
> given url.
>
> More that just showing urls, this tool allows navigation through
> backward and forward urls by selecting the displayed items.
>
> This approach is currently being shown as a Poster presentation in
> the 5th WWW conference. Details can be seen in
> http://www.di.uminho.pt/~cbm/htdoc/Overview.html
This sounds very interesting, it is exactly the sort of thing I was
looking for. I just hope that someone adopts it, and turns it into
a production system.
> There is a small world database (1.6 million known urls) ,
> gathered in november, at
> http://www.di.uminho.pt/wc
Access was a little slow, but the interface is fairly intuitive, and
manages to present a lot of useful information.
> We would appreciate any feedback on the usefullness of such
> a system and if any major search engine is willing to provide that,
> as all the needed data is already present.
Presumably if AltaVista or WebCrawler were to make their link database
available, you could process it into a format for Web Core?
The ability to navigate "back" to sites that refer to the present one is
of great benefit, and anything like Web Core that makes such linking
easier is a worthwhile project. Good luck,
--- Alex Chapman <alex@budgetweb.com> http://budgetweb.com/mercer/