Here's a tough one: I am currently searching for homepage URLs of
specific companies (eg. www.company.com) over four UK search engines
(google, alta vista, msn and yahoo) with the same search term every
time (accounting software). I need to know the rank of these homepages
on each search search engine (eg 134th, 43nd, 1st?) but am at the
moment having to go through pages and pages of results. Any ideas how
to make the process any easier? Thanks in advance...

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Request for Question Clarification by omniscientbeing-ga on 22 Aug 2002 09:54 PDT

Usually the search engines list at the top of the results page the #
of results, i.e. 4 of 1,254. What search terms specifically would you
like to know the rankings for, and I can get them for you.

~omniscientbeing

Hi thawishbone,

While there is software that can do this (such as
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/cgibin/seranker/seranker.cgi ), it
is not always reliable, so I would recommend doing it yourself by
using the methods below. Some search engines such as Google do not
permit software like this to check it. Yes, you have to go through
some pages, but not that many. For each search engine, use your
browser's "find" function (Ctrl+F on Internet Explorer or Netscape) to
find where on the page the specific result is.

Google UK
---------
Search on this page ://www.google.co.uk/ie , and add "num=100"
(without the quotes) to the end of the search results page. Each
result is numbered, and 100 results are shown on each page, so you
will only have to view several pages.

AltaVista UK
-------------
For AltaVista, you will have to count the results once you have found
the appropriate page. If each page has ten results, then the second
result on the second page would be 12. On AltaVista you can view more
results at a time by adding "nbq=50" to the end of the results URL.

MSN UK
-------
On MSN, all results are numbered by default, so you only need to find
the appropiate page in the results. You can change the number of
results per page at http://search.msn.co.uk/Preference.asp?FORM=MyPref
.

Yahoo! UK
----------
Like AltaVista, you will have to count the results once you have found
the appropriate page. Yahoo! displays 20 results per page by default.


Search Strategy:
Going to each of the search engines and finding the fastest method.


I hope this helps. If there was anything you didn't understand, please
request a clarification.
-Cheese-ga

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Clarification of Answer by cheese-ga on 22 Aug 2002 14:51 PDT

As mentioned in the comment by davidsar-ga, you do need to include
"&num=100" on Google and "&nbq=50" on AltaVista.

I specifically needed to avoid thumbing through pages of search
results which is why I posted this question. Luckily, your answer
spurred me towards finding software that did the job for me, and I
eventually purchased the excellent 'Rankchecker' for $69. Thanks for
your help.

I think to expand the search results to 100 for Google, the full text
to add to the URL of your search results must include the ampersand:

   &num=100

Good luck.