How Google Can Win the Hearts of Internet Marketers

As you undoubtedly know, Yahoo! and MSN recently agreed to a 10-year search deal (Search Engine Land breaks down the deal in simple terms, essentially pointing out the final nail struck in Yahoo!'s search coffin). Aaron Wall highlighted some SEO stuff that's still hanging in the balance, such as the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Site Explorer's link data features. The Yahoo! Directory has been one of the web's most valuable link directories, and Site Explorer is used by virtually every Internet marketer in our industry. Getting rid of (somewhat) reliable link data would make our jobs considerably more difficult...and here's where Google should step in. While Yahoo! and MSN are taking time to hash our their deal (it could take a couple years), Google should take the opportunity to really offer up some non-sucky link data. You can currently get a link analysis via Google using the link: command, but it returns a laughably small sample (Google Blog Search is considerably better with the command, though still only shows a sampling of links). I don't know why Google's been all butt hurt in the past about sharing some site information with webmasters, but now's the chance to step up and rectify that. Site Explorer was pretty much the most useful thing about Yahoo!, and while Yahoo! and MSN are busy sitting around trying to divvy up their assets like a couple of kids swapping Pokemon cards, Google needs to put on their schmoozin' face and win the hearts and loyalty of webmasters and Internet marketers. "What about a third party tool?" you say. Well, with a third party tool there's the inherent trust issue. If you don't know the company or brand very well, you might not trust it to develop and put out a credible link analysis tool. Besides, this sort of tool would take an immense amount of data to pull off, and a lot of sites don't have enough access to that sort of information like a search engine does, so accuracy comes into play...which then circles back to trust. If your tool has inaccurate or severely limited data, people won't trust the information it spits out and won't be likely to use it. I'm sure that some Internet marketing and SEO sites could come up with a decent tool and it would get a considerable amount of adoption, but it would pale in comparison to the usage a major search engine tool would get. Google already has the brand dominance and has established a large amount of trust, and you know they've got the data. It's time for them to fill the void if Yahoo! were to discontinue Site Explorer. Even if Site Explorer doesn't go away, Google can still take this opportunity to put out a link analysis tool that's better than Site Explorer's. Show nofollowed links, anchor text, redirected links, questionable/low quality links -- if Google can offer this sort of data, it would make Yahoo!/Bing's Site Explorer obsolete (I'm sure people would still use it for comparison's sake, but there would still obviously be a dominant t00l). That's what I'd like to see emerge from this news -- Google steps up to the plate and delivers some great new tools that help marketers and webmasters, which, in turn, would help the quality of Google's index and search results. What do you guys think? What should Google do/how should they answer to the merge announcement? Should they do anything at all, or do you think they'll keep doing what they've been doing since it seems to be working well for them thus far?