How you format or specify the URL that you submit to Site Explorer influences what kind of results you get. You can specify URLs in various formats. Here are examples of various URL formats with a description of the kind of results you would receive.
Note: If you submit text that is not recognized as 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 any of subdomains.
Note: Entering the URL http://www.yahoo.com would only return result that have a leading www.
It would not return results from http://maps.yahoo.com since http://maps.yahoo.com is not a subdomain of http://www.yahoo.com.
You can use links at the bottom of the results page to include pages from All subdomains or Only this domain in the results. Click Inlinks to view sites that link to the entire site or inlinks to 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 any subdomains. So http://yahoo.com returns results from http://maps.yahoo.com, http://local.yahoo.com, http://search.yahoo.com, and all other Yahoo! property subdomains in the index.
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 can 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.