Help talk:Linksearch

Limit of 60,000 results?
I've run a few searches and they all stop at 60,000. Eg. NLA and Google Books. Is there another tool that can provide stats for domains used over 60,000 times? Jimmyjrg (talk) 05:42, 9 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Just replying to myself. Using Quarry I was able to get better results. It's less user friendly though. Examples:
 * NLA: https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/75434 138,287 on Wed, 26 Jul 2023 04:01:49 UTC
 * Google Books: https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/75436 260,757 on Wed, 26 Jul 2023 04:29:29 UTC.
 * It looks like it ignores Talk pages so there's discrepancies between numbers using Linksearch and Quarry. Jimmyjrg (talk) 04:38, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Returns incomplete results, even though there are links from articles
The Linksearch tool is not reliable in returning all of the known external links to domains. For example: a Linksearch for the .com website of CBinsights...
 * Currently 12 results
 * However, potentially over 100 actual pages with links

Just one specific page that has a link to CBinsights is Creator economy, but it doesn't surface on the Linksearch tool. There are many others that you can check for yourself.

Does anyone know why this is happening? I don't recall in the past this tool being so undependable. - AppleBsTime (talk) 03:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Did External links search (Special:LinkSearch) change?
Hi, back in 2020 I used Special:LinkSearch to find articles contaning certain URL patters. I used it to search for articles that contain URLs that started with strictly "http://kb.nl" (so not "https://kb.nl", "http://www.kb.nl", " http://*.kb.nl " or similar patterns). Back then this query only returned URLs stricty starting with "http://kb.nl"

3 years later: I just tried this query again (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=500&offset=0&target=http%3A%2F%2Fkb.nl), but now I get results with URLS starting with http://www.kb.nl, http://liber-maps.kb.nl, http://poortman.kb.nl/, http://bltvn.kb.nl, http://opc4.kb.nl and other subdomains of http://kb.nl as well. That's not what I need.

Has the functionality of Special:LinkSearch indeed changed since 2020? And how can I get back the 'old' functionality? Can I tweak the API-call to serve the old functionality? OlafJanssen (talk) 13:14, 6 October 2023 (UTC)


 * See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&oldid=1179443594 for further discussion and solutions. OlafJanssen (talk) 08:53, 10 October 2023 (UTC)