Learn more about Site Explorer

What is Yahoo! Site Explorer?

The Yahoo! search database contains detailed information about the structure of the web. In addition to the web pages themselves, the database stores information about links among pages, and uses that information (as well as additional algorithms) to gauge the popularity of a given page.

Site Explorer gives you access to this information so you can learn about a site. To explore a site, you submit a URL using a search box, just as you would for a normal web search. You can then click links on the results page to see detailed information.

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How do I explore a site?

To begin exploring sites, you submit your URL to Site Explorer using the text box. Since you receive different results based on the form of URL you enter, you should read about how to specify URLs in Site Explorer to learn how to format your URL.

After you submit your URL and click the Explore URL button, you'll see a page with 50 results. Note that, unlike web search, where users are looking for content, Site Explorer results do not include abstracts. Rather, they show structure.

Site Explorer lets you view two aspects of sites:

• Viewing by site

  By default, Site Explorer displays all the pages in a site, displayed in normal search order. You can explore any individual result page by clicking the Explore URL link next to it. Clicking this button submits the URL as though you entered it in the text box.

• Viewing inlinks

  To view inlinks for a result, click the Inlinks link at the top of the page.

The results page also gives you other useful options:

• You can view either the live page or the cached version.
• You can export results in tab-separated form (TSV).
• You can click the Submit URL link to go to a page allowing you to submit a page to the Yahoo! search index.

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How do I specify URLs in Site Explorer?

You can specify URLs in different forms to display different results in Site Explorer. Below are the URL forms and what kind of results you receive. Of course, if you submit text that is not a URL, you will receive an error.

Site home page

Syntax: http://subdomain.domainname.topleveldomain

Example: http://www.yahoo.com

When you submit a home page to Site Explorer, by default you see all the pages within that site and its subdomains, if any. However, note that http://www.yahoo.com returns results with the leading www, but does not return results from http://maps.yahoo.com, since it is not a subdomain of http://www.yahoo.com.

Once results appear, you can use links at the bottom of the page to include pages from All subdomains or Only this domain in the results. In the inlinks view, you can choose to see inlinks to the Entire Site instead of just the URL specified.

Domain name

Syntax: http://domainname.topleveldomain

Example: http://yahoo.com

When you submit just a domain name to Site Explorer, you get all pages within the domain, including subdomains, if any. So http://yahoo.com returns results from http://maps.yahoo.com, http://local.yahoo.com,http://search.yahoo.com, and all other Yahoo! properties in the index.

Once results appear, you can use links at the bottom of the page to include pages from All subdomains or Only this domain in the results. In the inlinks view, you can choose to see inlinks to the Entire Site instead of just the URL specified.

Fully qualified path name

Syntax: http://subdomain.domainname.topleveldomain/path1/path2/file.html

Example: http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/info/index.html

If you enter a fully qualified path for a file, you will not get any sub URLs, because a file cannot have them. However, you will be able to see how many inlinks the file has.

Partial path of a URL, or a URL that is also a directory

Syntax: http://subdomain.domainname.topleveldomain/path1/path2

Example: http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/info

The following guidelines apply to paths:

• If you enter a partial path, you will get all URLs to that path (and below) from within that domain only.
• If the path is also a URL, you will see inlinks to that path. However, if the path is a directory but not a file, it might not have inlinks to view.

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Why do my results appear in a different order in Site Explorer and web search?

When you submit a search query, the results you receive are based on the terms you submit. In Site Explorer you submit a URL rather than query terms. This generates different results.

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Why aren't all my site's pages showing up in the results?

Check the URL you entered. Site Explorer searches for all the subdomains of your URL exactly as you submitted it. So if you submit http://www.sample.com, Site Explorer does not display http://support.sample.com because it's not a subdomain. It's important that you understand how to specify URLs in Site Explorer.

Try the following:

• Enter just the domain, such as http://sample.com, which displays pages from all subdomains by default. You can limit this to pages only from sample.com by clicking Only this domain at the bottom of the page.
• If you are looking for a particular URL and it's not in the results for your query, you can refine your query to a more specific path.

If your URL is still not in the index, please submit it to Yahoo.

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How do I submit URLs to the search index?

If you discover that your site has pages that are missing from the search index, Site Explorer has a link on each page that you can use to go to the Yahoo! submit page : http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/free/submit. Submitting URLs requires Yahoo! registration.

Yahoo! wants to have the most comprehensive search index on the web and would like to find out about any URLs we have missed. However, in the effort to maximize the quality of search results that appear on Yahoo! and our other distribution partners, we do not add every submitted URL to our search index. Therefore we cannot make predictions or guarantees about when or whether your URL will appear as a search result. To increase the chances of including your URL in the index, please be aware of Yahoo's content guidelines.

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