Girls, please don’t all throw your virtual knickers at me at once, but I once reviewed a book on how to use Google for the UK UNIX Users’ Group magazine, subsequently republished in the official magazine of the American Accounting Association—or something like that. After reading the book, I became a Google ninja. By way of sharing my superhuman search engine assassin powers I now present an alternative to using Technorati (which hardly ever works) to find out which ‘Blogs have linked to you recently. [WARNING: Only works for ‘Blogs with unique names.]

  1. Go to Google Blog Search.
  2. Type the name of your ‘Blog into the search box, enclosing it in quotes if it contains more than one word in its title. For example, if your ‘Blog is called “To The Tooting Station”, type 
    "to the tooting station"

    (but without the backslashes that WordPress is insisting on inserting above against my will).

  3. After a space, type 
    -site:

    followed immediately (no spaces) by the root URL of your ‘Blog—that is, everything up to the first single slash in its Web address. For example, if your ‘Blog is at 

    http://tothetootingstation.typepad.com/blog/

    then type 

    http://tothetootingstation.typepad.com/

    The minus prefix to the word “site” is essential, because this excludes links into your ‘Blog that come from your own domain.

  4. Click the “Search Blogs” button.
  5. Follow the displayed links and respond bitchily to your critics in their ‘Blogs’ comment boxes.
  6. Repeat until you acquire a life.

Here is a link to the example search used above.