Although Google does not offer a similar tool like Yahoo Site Explorer used to be, it does offer a lot of useful features.   We are left hoping that some day they may consider bringing a tool like this to the masses in order to fill the gap that Yahoo has left.   The best correlating tool in the Google world is known as Google Webmaster Tools and it comes in handy if you are the owner of the site and can authenticate with their services in order to view all the gory details about their crawling on your site.

Even without Google Webmaster Tools you can get some idea of the backlinks to a site by doing this according to their documentation:

“You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list a selection of the web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the”link:” and the web page URL.”

In terms of the backlinks that you are used to seeing with Yahoo Site Explorer, you simply will not get that level of granularity UNLESS you are the owner/operator of the site and have authenticated the site with webmaster tools.

Google webmaster tools is nice because it provides you with a lot of information on how you can improve your site including any problems, errors, and general trends that you just don’t get with Google Analytics.

Here is a snapshot of what the dashboard looks like once you sign up, log in, and select your site:

To see a much larger sampling of links to any verified site in Webmaster Tools, once you have authenticated a site to be seen in Webmaster tools, do the following:

1. Select the site you want on the Webmaster Tools Home page.
2. Select Your site on the web, and then click Links to your site.

You should see some screens that look like this:

There are some very helpful screens and stats available to help you understand more about the sites that are linking in to you including the following:

1. Who links the most (domains)
2. How the data is linked (keywords)
3. Your most linked content (target URLs)

There is a dedicated section for each of these with more verbose details.  What more could you want?  Coupling Google Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics seems like the perfect combination if you are the owner and operator of the site.

Good luck!