database for back link checking tools?

[Makaveli2007]

This might sound a bit paranoid, but I've been wondering, what would happen if yahoo & altavista wouldn't show you the # of backlinks to your site anymore.

Msn has already stopped it (for whatever reason?) and Google doesn't seem to like showing you all your backlinks, anyways.

Would a good coder be able to come up with a tool, that gives you the displays how many backlinks a site has? You'd probably need a really huge database, that only the SEs have, as all the sites pointing links to your site would have to be in the index, right?

But then again, if everybody else stopped doing it any search engine would be more than happy to give you a thorough backlink count to increase its mindshare/market share, hm?

[ogletree]

You could build a program that used your log files. Have it find referrers and then check the site to see if your link is there and if it has a nofollow on it or not. This would not catch them all. Over time it would come up with a decent list.

[souFrag]

what would happen if yahoo & altavista wouldn't show you the # of backlinks to your site anymore.

Do they show the number of backlinks? Where?

[MrManager]

On Yahoo, just do a search for link:www.yourdomain.com

[Makaveli2007]

or use linkdomain: so you get the links to your whole site