Friday 22 May 2009

Chapter 5: Automatic Search Engine Searches: LexiURL Searcher

Please leave any comments on Chapter 5: Automatic Search Engine Searches: LexiURL Searcher here.

15 comments:

  1. Dear Dr.Thelwall
    How are you?
    can you explain the differents between LexiURL Searcher and SocSciBot? and when I must use one of them?
    In fact, I want to creat hyperlink networks for arab universities on the web; to determine the interlinking between them. can I do that by using LexiURL Searcher?
    nice day for you,,,
    mahmoud (Egypt)

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  2. Dear Mahmoud,

    I'm fine thanks and hope you are well too.

    SocSciBot crawls web sites and extracts the hyperlinks from them. You can use it to get comprehensive information about the links between Arabic university web sites. SocSciBot will take a long time to crawl these web sites if there are many (more than 10) that you are interested in.

    LexiURL Searcher gets data on links from Yahoo! and can also give information about the links between arabic university web sites. For example, you can use the Network Diagram wizard option to get a network diagram of the links. This is much faster than SocSciBot but gives less complete lists of links between the web sites.

    I recommend that you start with LexiURL Searcher and switch to SocSciBot only if you really need the extra information that it gives. This will save you a lot of time.

    Best wishes,
    Mike

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  3. Please note that Webometric Analyst is the new name for LexiURL Searcher. Also, link searches in Webometric Analyst use URL citations (mentions of URLs in the text of web pages) rather than hyperlinks. This is because hyperlink searches are no longer available for programs. Please download Webometric Analyst from http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk

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  4. In January 2012, Webometric Analyst started to give far fewer results for all its searches. This is because it gets its data from Bing and Bing reduced the results sent by about 80%. It is not clear whether normal service via Bing will resume or not. I am sorry if this causes you problems.

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  5. Today (February 4, 2012) Webometric Analyst started to give far more results for Bing searches than for the past month - in fact it now gives the most results per search (up to about 650) since April 2011. It is not clear yet whether Bing will be unpredictable or whether this new change is relatively permanent. My recommendation for using Webometric Analyst would be to not rely upon results from it and also to try it a week later and a month later if you are using it and it gives too few results.

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  6. hello Dr. Thelwall
    can explain me if we get error 403: Forbidden while generating the webometric analyst account key we are getting these error how to rectify it and we had log in hotmail and windows azure marketplace also we got the key but not able to generate that can u explain me what to do?
    thank you
    have a nice day
    madhu(INDIA)

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    Replies
    1. Dear Ms. madhuri,

      After getting the key you have to go to the following page.

      https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/8818F55E-2FE5-4CE3-A617-0B8BA8419F65

      5000 Transactions/month is free. After this selection you can use webometric analyst software. Feel free to contact me any other details.

      thiyagarajans.dr@gmail.com
      Chennai, India

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    2. thank you very much Dr.Thiyagarajan

      here i have another doubt regarding web impact factor how to get WIF using query domain:domain name i have referred so many preciously published article in that they have mentioned these query. we tried these one so many time in the google scholar but we are not able to get the number of web pages in particular mentioned site. can you please guide us how to get the WIF

      thank you Dr.
      have a nice day
      Madhu (INDIA)

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  7. Hello Madhu,
    I had the same problem myself when I forgot to do the 2nd and 3rd steps of registering to use the service!
    Please see the information here about how to get the new version working and to test your key. http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk/searcher/AzureKey.html and note that you have to follow *3* steps to get the key working - step 1, requesting the service, is not enough.
    Best wishes,
    Mike

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  8. Hello Dr Thelwall,
    I am Ramesh, I am referring your book introduction to webometrics, in that chapter3 link analysis, you have mentioned about linkdoman:doman_name, we tried this query in google search but we are not able to get the exact links and also we tried domain:domain_name ( for eg : domain:wlv.ac.uk) for to retrive no of webpages in the website, i didn't find correct link to find the specific number.

    Hence I request you to guide me to get the reuslts from these queries.

    Thank you,
    Ramesh
    India

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  9. Hello Madhu,
    The domain: command has been replaced by the site: command so please try this one. It will not work in Webometric Analyst for large web sites because Webometric Analyst does not report *estimates* for the number of matches for queries with over 1000 matches - and most academic web sites have over 1000 pages.
    Best wishes,
    Mike

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  10. Hi Dr. Thelwall,

    I am trying to do a sentence query in Arabic through the Webometric Analyst for a research. The Analyst gives me 0 results if the sentence is bracketed "" or the individual words linked by +s. There are query results if the sentence is entered without bracketing or pluses, but the results do not reflect the sentence as a whole, but gives results for each word in the sentence on an individual basis making the results redundant for analysis.

    Thank you.

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  11. Hi - I can't think of a solution, sorry. As far as I know, Arabic searches work OK with quotes but the + are not needed in the search. It may be that there are too few matches for your searches once they are more restrictive? The API gives less results than the main Bing interface, so if your search in Bing.com only gives a few results then the API might give none. It might help to try the searches in Bing.com before Webometric Analyst, if you are not already doing this.
    Best wishes,
    Mike

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  12. Thank you Dr. Thelwall, as you said API is more restrictive than Bing.com - in the Arabic query case it does not take to full sentence queries, it gives results for 2 word queries with quotes, where Bing.com does full sentences without quotes (it trumps google in that with Arabic). The search I'm doing brought back thousands of results on bing.com. I have used the Webometric Analyst (WA) for URLs on a previous research with good results in English, Arabic and French. WA lends itself very well to insights into blogs and archived material that is deeper imbedded. Now I've learned that there are limits to the complexity of sentence queries, at least for Arabic.

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