Have you tried doing a backlink search lately on Yahoo?

Guess what?

It doesn't work! :-(

Sometime over the weekend one of my staff members who does a LOT of research for me EVERYDAY, emails me to say, "Dori, something is wrong with Yahoo!, it is not giving me backlink detail for my research!"

And sure enough, I checked it out, and what I got was tragic!

It's not a total surprise since they did announce back in July (Bing Blog on Site Explorer Closer) they were going to close it down, but now that it is gone, well, makes me kind of sad. So now along with Yahoo! search..Yahoo! Site Explorer has gone totally Bing! 

 
And the worst part is, is that Bing is pulling a Google and NOT showing us all link data. They have redirected SEO's to their webmaster tools, but that isn't looking promising either. When asked about competitive data Duane Forrester of Bing says..

"..So, I will tell you about what I have about your website, and you can have hundreds of websites and I'll tell you about all of those individually through the tool set. I won't give you the facility to simply enter another domain of your choosing and get similar data back. "  -  from SEOMoz 10/20/11 White Board Interview

And they aren't, for example, I just did a search on www.About.com, a site we all know that has a gazillion links going into it, and while OpenSiteExplorer.com and MajesticSEO.com are reporting hundreds of thousands of backlinks, Yahoo! ala Bing, is reporting a measly 112! (And yes, Bing reports the same thing)

So, what does this mean?

1) Bing now has 30% search share and that is something to pay attention too.

2) SEO's will have to resort to 1 of 2 paid services for competive data (OpenSiteExplorer and MajesticSEO).

So for me, who uses this type of data everyday, it isn't that big a deal, and I belong to both. But, for the newbie or the person who needs the data only once in a while, the debunkness of Yahoo's Site Explorer Tool will be sorely missed.

----------------
TO COMMENT.. please click on the "Continue" button below! :-)