Data collection system for link analysis

The study presented in this paper exploited several possible ways to meet the needs of link analysis in Webometrics and developed a prototype (LinkDiscoverer) that collects data from both real-time links and search engines. The prototype consists of two parts: a crawling part for collecting real-time link data from a given domain or site and a search engine part for harvesting link data from search engines by using specific search commands. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of LinkDiscoverer on link analysis. The results show that the LinkDiscovererpsilas functions can well satisfy the needs for link analysis. This study contributes to data collection methods and selection strategy in Webometrics.