I work for an organization that is trying to assess the reach of
reports that we publish.  We do this in many ways - media monitoring
and counting downloads from our web site are just two examples.  But
we would also like to understand how widely our reports are
referenced/cited on others' web pages (and be able to compare this to
similar reports by others).  All of the reports (ours and the
comparators) can be downloaded for free on the web as either PDF or
HTML files.

At first, we thought that this would be as simple as running a web
search using a major search engine for the title of the report and the
organization name and counting how many times it comes up.  But this
appears to produce quite inconsistent results for different
organizations or even ever-so-slightly different search terms.  (Note:
searching for links to the reports doesn't work since they tend to be
posted on a few web sites or with a few URLs).

Rather than scratching our heads for a very long time, I thought that
we should see if someone else has already figured this out.  Can
anyone help?  I would love a reference to a document/web page
describing effective tracking strategies or just advice on how to
accomplish this.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 04 Oct 2006 18:09 PDT

hlppls-ga,

It would be helpful to have a bit more detail here, particularly, a
link to an actual document that you are itnerested in tracking, and
some examples of the types of searches you performed.

Thanks,

pafalafa-ga