Suppose you want your search to return only pages that are the target of links when the link text matches your search. To do so, you can use the allinanchor:and inanchor:operators. These operators search only text that consists of clickable links on Web pages.
Another way of putting this is that the text being searched falls inside <a>
</a>, or anchor,tags in the underlying HTML. Less formally, an anchor is a term or phrase that identifies a document in a noncomputerese language so that when people click the link they know what they’re getting. Few Webmasters would write an anchor like Mr. McGee’s Fishing Siteif they were linking to www.acmeknitting.com; an anchor such as Visit Acme Knitting would be more probable.
Because anchor text is reasonably likely to contain a straightforward descrip-tion of the content of the page being linked to, using anchor text for pinpointed research often makes good sense, even though the return result is the site being linked to (for example, www.acmeknitting.com).
To take this a little further, if you already know you are interested in Acme Knitting, it’s easy to end up on the Acme Knitting site. But suppose you want to find the best site about knitting in general. A search for
inanchor:knitting
returns pages that are the targets of links that have the keyword knittingin link text somewhere on the Web pages, including Acme Knitting. The order of the search results tells you the most-linked sites — a gauge of popularity, and a rough indicator of quality on the Web.
In another example, suppose a Web page contains a whole bunch of text and the phrase Times Square in New York is a clickable link. If you want to find all Web pages that are linked to with anchors that contain the words New York Times in clickable links, you use the allinanchor:operator, along with the three words New York Times in your search; the page linked to by the Times Square in New Yorkanchor shows up in the results set.
The allinanchor:and inanchor:operators are probably the most useful of the occurrences operators, but they can also be the most difficult to wrap your brain around.
The anchor operators match a keyword, multiple keywords, or a search phrase with the text that accompanies a hyperlink. The returned page is the one pointed to by the hyperlink, not the one containing the text. For example, suppose that the HTML for the page www.braintique.com(like thousands of other sites) contains a link to the New York Times Web site (www.nytimes.com):
I get my news from the
<a href=”http://www.nytimes.com”>New York Times</a>!
An allinanchor:search for the phrase New York Times:
allinanchor: New York Times
returns a list of sites that are the targets of links on pages that use the terms New, York,and Timesin their anchor text. Not surprisingly, the New York Times Online site itself is one of these targets, and as a result of its popularity, the New York Times site appears at the top of the return results set for this search.
A few things you ought to remember about the allinanchor:and inanchor:operators:
Resulting pages are targets, not originators of the anchors. The allin anchor:and inanchor:operators return results pages that are the tar-gets of pages that use your search term in their anchors; to repeat in a different way, the results aren’t the pages containing the anchors, but the targets to which the anchors point.
Search terms don’t have to all appear in the same link text (anchor).
For example, this search:
allinanchor: Groups Froogle
finds the main Google page, which includes Groups in one link, and Froogle in a separate link. (Don’t be fooled because the results set includes the Google page; the links on the page with the Groupsand Froogletext themselves point to Google, which is why Google is returned.) Use quotes to get exact links. If you want to find pages with link text
that includes an exact phrase, you should use the inanchor:or allin anchor:operator (either will do) combined with a quoted phrase. For example:
inanchor:”New York Times”
returns pages with the literal phrase “New York Times” in a single anchor, not potentially divided up in a bunch of different anchors with
“New,” “York,” and “Times”in the different anchors.
Mind you, without the quotes, keywords don’t have to be in order, either, so without quotation marks you risk the possibility of finding results such as the target of an anchor to the New Times or the York Times.
In essence, the allinanchor:and inanchor:operators let you obtain search results based on the links leading to a site. From a research perspec-tive, you can use this team of operators as your own personal version of the Google PageRank popularity determination (see Chapter 11 for more about the Google PageRank). For example, in Table 5-2, the example query for
allinanchor: best research tools
returns a list of sites with research tools good enough that someone has bothered to link to them with the text best research toolsin the link (you can see some of the snippets pointing to these research tools in Figure 5-2).
The search
inanchor:deciduous trees
looks for the word deciduousin the text of a hyperlink and the word tree somewhere in the text of a document, and returns a much more pinpointed list of sites with information about deciduous trees, rather than a straight search for the keywords deciduous trees— because the sites in the results set were linked to with text that included the word deciduous.
These operators allow you to harness the power of hyperlinking on the Web so that you can hone your research results.
The in:operators must precede the term they modify without a space. In contrast, the allin:operators are allowed a space (these operators refer to all terms and must appear first in the search query). It’s better form to keep the space for allin:operators.