Google WebQuotes

Google WebQuotes: "WebQuotes "

Think you know everything about searching on Google? Think again. Underneath it all, there's a host of little-known features that can be used for market research. Here's three:

1. Find out what people say about your site.

WebQuotes [1], a Google Lab experiment, allows you to find out what people say about a person, Website, or product.

I suggest trying variations of your site name, such as "SitePoint", "www.sitepoint.com" and "http://www.sitepoint.com" to see if they bring up different results.

2. Do a background check.

If you type in "info:siteURL.com", Google will provide you background information about any site on the Internet. This includes links to cached copies of the site, similar and related sites, pages that link to the site, and pages that mention the site.

3. View indexed pages.

As of several weeks ago, searching for "site:www.URL.com" brings up a list of all indexed pages in Google. Prior to this being implemented, the only way to get an guesstimate as to the number of indexed page was to run a search like "site:www.sitepoint.com -asdfkljasdf", which often resulted in inaccurate results.

It doesn't make a difference where or not you put "www." in front of the URL, the result will be the same.

When running this search, I noticed that the number for SitePoint.com would switch between 163,000 and 169,000 indexed pages. I'm not sure what why this is; maybe it has to do with the server processing the query. I recommend running it a few times and going with the highest number.