Winooski - 5:37 pm on Sep 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

I'm wasn't at SES San Jose in August, so I didn't catch Tim Mayer's spiel on Site Explorer. While I don't know what expectation Mayer was setting there, when I look at Stephan Spencer's very sober SES San Jose writeup [stephanspencer.com], it appears as though Mayer was promising more-or-less what Yahoo!'s just delivered.

For example, Spencer wrote (my additions in italics):

Yahoo! (Search) offers a much more comprehensive sample of backlinks than Google, but not a complete set of backlinks. New system (Site Explorer) will be reasonably comprehensive, in his (Mayer's) opinion the most comprehensive out there.

Meanwhile, here's what RustyBrick had to write about that same session with Tim Mayer [forums.searchenginewatch.com]:

He showed an example, you basically type in a URL into it (this is also supported via an API, good good), then you hit explore URl and it spits out the number of pages found in Yahoo Index and also shows you the number of inlinks. You can sort pages by "depth" how deep pages are and you can also submit URLs here. You can also quickly export the results to TSV format.

True, Site Explorer doesn't appear currently to have that "sort pages by 'depth'" functionality. Is that what all the disappointment's about? I'm curious what people's expectations really were.