RIP YSE. Web marketers, for the most part, have lost a tool for link discovery, mostly for competitors. What Goolge Webmaster Tools puts behind closed doors, the YSE was publicly available to all. This year it was announced with the merge of Bing! Microsoft and Yahoo! search engines, YSE would be phased out.
Today is official closing day.
Some didn’t rely heavily on YSE so they have alternatives, but we can’t argue, YSE provided the easiest, and free, method to find link information about websites. That process is now a bit harder.
Here are some alternatives to help you through YSE withdrawal.
1) Use Bing Webmaster Tools (according to Yahoo!). I don’t see any equivalent there though so this may be a moot point.
2) Blekko has their own link query tool (same as yahoo! link:https://www.yourdomain.com)
3) use OSE. You can get limited results for free, but otherwise you’ll need a subscription.
4) Continue to use Google’s search parameters like intitle and inurl: parameters.
Honestly, there is no YSE equivalent in terms of comprehensiveness because no other search engine or link service had the data set the search engine Yahoo! had. There are alternatives, but ultimately the public choices are not as robust–yet.