Are there any other services like that out there?
What would rolling my own look like?
I'm looking for a way to automatically look up any sites linking to a given URL.
I'm building a memetracker and while I've got the related stories and clumping of them in hand, tracking down the discussion links in the way that Techmeme does it is proving much harder to do.
I was wondering if there was a way to do it other than Cosmos. And if not, what would be involved in creating something that does that? Building a web spider?
I don't think there is a real-time way to see how many sites are linking to another unless they're being crawled quite often by google/yahoo/technorati OR you have a script installed on their site to see the inbound links and gauge traffic.
Use the syntax "link:http://www.someurl.com/"