I am sure they will replace this service with a better one. It is not that they will permanently shut it down, I don't think so.
If they are going to do this, it might as well be that Yahoo! shut itself down and merge all their services into Bing. At the rate they are going, I am surprised they haven't done this already.
I trust that they know what they're doing and hopefully the combined efforts will provide better indexing of content and backlinks. However, I have noticed several of the web services that I've been using for years have came out with some pretty horrible new updates so it wouldn't surprise me if this fails too. If it ain't broke don't fix it!
Yahoo site explorer is a nice resource and tool. It will be too bad to see it shut down. Bing doesn't usually do a very good job. We'll see, but I am not counting on Bing results being that great.
I guess we all will get a bing webmaster tools then . I just hope that all the tools on the internet that are using it now, will be able to continue to work .
All you people that think it will just move to Bing and we shouldn't worry, it's not true. They will shut it down! The reason? It takes too much resources and no profit for Yahoo. But I think that if enough people will complain, maybe they will think it again. Read the story here and also post comments asking them to keep the service.
I agree 100%. Yahoo Site Explorer will be shut down no matter what people say. The reason? Yahoo has no profit from this tool and it uses a lot of resources. All SEO Tools use Yahoo Site Explorer to show the backlinks to a site. Also there many Firefox and Chrome plugins, like SEOQuake for example that display backlinks on each site you visit, even if you didn't ask for it. Finally, for those who say that it will be used with Bing, I want to remind you that a few months ago, Bing disabled the option to see backlinks for a website. Just got to bing and try link:www.yourdomain.com.
i wrote my own spider that checks backlinks, and unlike many other tools it doesnt exactly use the site explorer api feedback? => www.site-explorer-hack.com
Why worry about checking links in that tool? Just focus on getting more rather than counting your old ones.