Tim Mayer from Yahoo today announced the new Yahoo Site Explorer tool to for full-strength, maximum coverage backlink analysis on Yahoo, without the need to go with the old "link:" and "linkdomain:" commands... a great step..

some features:

• download back link data via CSV
• sort yourself by priority or other counts
• Yahoo tries to give you the max. number of links (sounds like some spammy are going to be filtered out anyway)
• and the best - a programmatic *Backlinks API* that people can use to build great tools on (e.g. like the Link Harvester )

The tool will be accessible next week at siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com but currently there's just a redirect to the advanced search...

That tool not only takes a lot of load from the yahoo servers, but also from SEO's bandwidth and work needed to get good information on site's backlinks...

update 8/19: the site-explorer is still down / not released yet...

Some other coverage on this topic at

SEW blogs
WMW