Puzzlepieces – tag ‘urlinfo’

URLinfo beta || Fagan Finder - URLinfo is a tool I built years ago. It was first called “Site Specific” when I put it up on on October 1, 2001 (see a November cache), finally rebranding it as URLinfo during August 2004. I last updated it on October 2004, which unfortunately means that although an excellent tool in theory, it needs some updates to be as useful once again.

URLinfo isn’t totally unique, I have seen a variety of other tools do something similar (such as Firefox extensions), but nothing as comprehensive, or done in exactly the same way.

Anyhow, today, via del.icio.us popular I find http://url-info.appspot.com/ . I’m not linking to it, because I don’t think they deserve that. Now, URLinfo is a name someone else could come up with themselves. Even with the same spelling. Even for a similar tool. Of course, the fact that the actual text of their home page is partly copied off of my URLinfo’s homepage pretty much eliminates the coincidence aspect. Not to mention their equally prominent mention of bookmarlets, although of course they aren’t as cool as mine

If this was a site by another name, and without blatanly copying mine, I would say “nice effort” and bookmark it. So, loyal readers (all two of you)… what should I do?

Google Webmaster Tools - Webmaster Tools - this will now show you all links that Google knows of to your own pages.

Some things I noticed

• there is a lot of spam, especially search result pages and wikipedia clones
• Google’s indexing multiple versions of wiki pages on pbwiki.com

So I was looking at the stats for Fagan Finder; it’s always nice to see new data, and I’ve never been very good at keeping track of it all myself. According to Google, 64% of the links are to the Translation Wizard. In second place is my article on RSS at 13%, and URLinfo at 8%. 98% of links to the Translation Wizard are websites using the translate this page feature. I had to play with the data in Excel to arrive at this.

Clearly there’s a power law going on here. And this is yet another confirmation that the Translation Wizard was a huge winner, and since it is largely broken now, seriously needs an update. I just do not have the time. Ideas, anyone?