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A Question for Technorati

Earlier today, Steven posted on his blog:

AOV Link Screen Shot

Notice that there are four hyperlinks back to this site (I’ve highlighted each link in a red box). When Technorati spidered Steven’s site, the result, in my Technorati Cosmos is four links:

Technorati Screen Shot

In their FAQ, Technorati defines an inbound link:

In a blog or on a webpage, the term inbound links refers to the hyperlinks pointing to that page or blog entry.

On one level, then, because there are four hyperlinks in Steven’s post, it makes sense that it would appear four times in my Cosmos. It would be handy, however, to have this boiled down to one link, which is what it really is.

Presumably this would be possible simply by counting a link only once per blog post.

Is it?

Wednesday, September 8, 2004 - 7:37pm
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Comments

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on September 8, 2004
To answer a question I raised at lunch: Eva Amurri, who played Cassandra in Saved! is daughter of Susan Sarandon.
Johnny's picture
Johnny on September 8, 2004
Spidered? Cosmos? For the ignorant among us, what in the hell are you talking about?
Ian Kallen's picture
Ian Kallen on September 8, 2004
Thanks for your input! I agree that separate post excerpts for each link make the cosmos search results more difficult to read. We’ve discussed ways to reorganize the display to support an aggregate result item, I’m hoping to make it a part of an upcoming design iteration. -Ian (speaking from though not necessarily for Technorati)
mary hodder's picture
mary hodder on September 9, 2004
Hi Johnny, Spidering is what Technorati and other services that “crawl” the web do to find and index information. Since Technorati is looking for blog info, it’s spiders go to a blog post to get all the info, so that when people search, the post is included in the database. Cosmos is a term we use to describe all the inbound links to a blog post, blog, article, piece of music, book or website, or anything else that can be linked to because it’s a URL on the web. It’s a metaphor we’ve used to try to convey what it means to have a single URL in the center, and lots of sites surrounding it as they link to that URL. However, much of this metaphor relies on users having some experience with the web (another metaphor) and blogs, because they traverse links from one blog post to another, and then possible use Technorati to see who is linking to what. I also agree with Peter that we could do a much better job showing people their inbound links, or cosmos, as they search Technorati and see results that are similarly situated, but technically constitute independent links. This is something we are addressing now, and hope to solve soon for users. Thanks very much, Peter, for making the problem so clear. It helps us to have user input like this to understand what is most important for people as they use the service. Mary Hodder, Technorati
al o'neill's picture
al o'neill on September 9, 2004
I noticed one day tha a whole bunch of links into my page were appearing because someone included me in their sidebar, so every time they posted an entry with its own page, it would link back to me. Technorati seemed to clear that problem up, funny that this still happens, one would have thought it would be the same problem.. Perhaps they are relying on the various ways blog engines delimit ‘posts’ from each other in a screen scrape.. too bad sydication wasn’t a little more standardized, that would seem to me to fix te problem at its core.

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