New paths and alternatives to webometrics

Abstract

With nearly 15 years of existence, today webometrics experiences a crisis scenario and new challenges facing the restrictions on access to information imposed by commercial search engines, putting into question the traditional hyperlink analyzes. Historically, the link was the central unit of information to webometrics for being the direct link between the actors (pages) that make up the Web. Given this scenario, how can we get webometric data from now on? At this critical time, new opportunities are created by the development of methodologies for the field. In this paper we point out some thoughts and explore possibilities that have been discussed among researchers, such as the return to the use of web crawlers and the search for the URL and words citation in commercial search engines, and presents a fairly unexplored approach through the use of the Google´s “allinanchor:” operator.