This is short but i wanted to get this point across. If you want to know what links google has found..... USE WEBMASTER TOOLS.... thank you lol
Well web master tools is good but the point is you said google finds backlinks faster, i dont think so that it is that fast. It is faster for big websites like digitalpoint but not fast for small websites.
I agree Matt It definitely depends on how big your site is. Basis the crawling rate and basis the size of the linking site your links are picked by google. Bt no doubt Google webmaster tool is THE BEST Tool...
Google webmaster tool really perfect or free of cost tool for viewing which links are count for back links or which not.
But remember using it not to add your backlinking sites to the same account or use it on the same ip.
As far as I know, it's the best backlink tool you can get nowadays. I don't know why Yahoo got their site explorer down. It used to be a really useful one. There are a lot of paid alternatives, but they are too expensive for myself, because I am just a young student. As it was said - the best and the fastest one is Google webmaster tool
Well when you do posts on a Wordpress site, it automatically pings it. That basically means it gets indexed in 2 hours or so. On a stale old html site it might take longer though.