Yahoo Site Explorer Shut Down ?

Finally Yahoo announces that Yahoo Site Explorer Shut down due to merging with Bing. :(

I'm reading about it at search engine land. Apparently YSE has become Bing webmaster tools after the merge.

Quote:

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As Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) rolls in to Bing Webmaster Tools the information will be initially restricted to sites you own - so competitor analysis will be lost this way. Though if Bing wants to get more people using their tools instead of Google, the move would be to include competitor data access like YSE showed. I would switch to get that access.

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You can read the rest here: search engine land

Was YSE only good for its competitor analysis?

I particularly used yahoo site explorer to check for my competitor's backlinks. However after the shut down of yahoo site explorer, Is there any other trust worthy and free version tool to check for the competitor's backlinks ?

The post at SE land has a few options but they aren't free unfortunately. Maybe someone has a few ideas that can help with this?

Its favorable if you want to optimized in yahoo.. bing will follow :) hititng 2 birds at one stroke. :)

Open Site Explorer is another good option.