The Core

Ugh, now I'm gonna have to change my standard forum answer to people wondering about Google's link: command. Blast!

Personally I would have nuked all link commands in G and Y if I was running either of them. They give too much data to us.

For those not doing a continual volume of link-building or link research, the loss of a free tool like Yahoo's can hurt. 

At PubCon, Dixon showed me a new, more user-friendly interface for Majestic that's a little like SiteExplorer on steroids... extremely nice, but unfortunately not free.  I don't know whether that interface will be made available for analyzing your own site (or client sites you have access to). 

Bing's Duane Forrester (bingdude) mentioned in his PubCon presention that he hopes he can persuade Bing to come out with a tool like SiteExplorer that won't be limited to just data about one's own site.  It would be nice to have such a public tool available. 

I'm not a fan of SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer, so I can't say much about it.  Pretty limited capabilities, as I remember, with data that's about a month behind.  I think SEOmoz has the most to gain by providing a free tool, so it's possible it may get better.  Anyone experienced with it?  I don't think there's anything else, unless you count Blekko, which is basically self-censored and therefore limited, particularly for competitive research where you want to see why competitors are ranking.   

It would be ironic if Google were actually showing us most of the links it counts. 

Sad day.  When starting out in SEO, YSE was invaluable.  I spent probably weeks looking though 1000s of sites and their links, and the links of their links.  Going to make it harder for newbies to get started IMO. 

This is going to make competitor research crazy hard, Openexplorer IMO is trash and majestic is just inaccurate.

So is there an opportunity here? Can a low cost site explorer for newbes be cobbled together by someone from th3core?

there has to be an opp for a good link extractor.  code wise its probably fairly easy just to scrape the internet and store what sites link to what, but the actual task of building that database with server costs would be massive... wouldnt it?

That is what MajesticSEO set out to do - and, yes, the cost and effort is very significant.

I always preferred Majestic to Yahoo anyway - neither were great though

Blekko.com may become the new, beginner/small webmaster, tool.  Not as extensive as Yahoo Site Explorer but it does have some data as to who is linking to a given site, which is better than nothing. Plus free.