Microsoft recently announced the ability to research what pages a domain links at. For example, see what pages this site links at using LinkFromDomain:SEOBook.com. You can also use their advanced search features in combination with LinkFromDomain to look for links pointing at domains within a specific geograph region, and / or adjust the result order by popularity and freshness.

As most seasoned SEOs knows, Google gives sucky inbound linkage data. You still can get a decent sample of recent inbound linkage data from the Google BlogSearch link function though. For example, here are recent blog posts linking at SEOBook.com. Technorati provides similar linkage data.

You can get a more comprehensive view of linkage data using Yahoo! Site Explorer.

I plan on updating SEO for Firefox to include the LinkFromDomain feature and check if URLs are linked from the Wikipedia.

In addition to all of these forward and backward link tools many video content sites and social bookmarking programs allow you to use other's work to explore interesting items, which sorta brings the fun back to the web...finding all kinds of cool stuff.

As technology evolves, and more users become editors, the value of being a general editor will be commoditized to nothing unless you work long hours, have a community helping you, are heavily biased, passionate, or can add some other significant value to the information you consume and sort. But if you are an agressive marketer being able to sort through information so many different ways makes the job much more fun because it gives you so many options.

DaveN is making a metasearch SEO tool by the name of Zippy.

Please leave feedback and requests @ TW.

AOL has a bias toward consumer (ie: non b2b) type queries, and they may have a higher % of brand related searches that both act to place a bit more emphasis on the top search result than general searchers from other search engines, but some people have dug through the 20 million search queries AOL gave away and come up some stats.

SEO Blackhat dug through the numbers and has a free tool for estimating clicks based on search volume estimates and rank position.

A few people have created free cool web based tools which allow you to search through the 20 million keywords AOL recently shared with the marketing community. http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/ - allows you to sort data by:

• User ID
• Keywords
• Date of search
• URL

http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/

• allows you to sort data by TLD
• allows you to sort data by keywords leading to a specific domain
• by default the tool also displays the top few thousand URLs, the number of referrals to a URL, shows the top keywords leading to a URL, shows the keyword diversity ratio

http://www.dontdelete.com/ - search by keyword, keyword stem, or part of a keyword to find related keywords. For example, if you searched for dati it would return all keywords that had dating in them.

Anyone think I should add a link to any of these tools on my keyword research tool?

Matt Cutts is looking for feedback on improving Google Sitemaps.

I'm expecting some creative answers here. I'll phrase it more generally: Forget XML files or even what Sitemaps looks like currently. What info would you want as a webmaster?

If you could design your dream webmaster or site owner console on Google, what would it look like?

Rand announced the launch of his page strength tool, which aims to be more accurate than Google's PageRank. The one downside to the tool is that there is a delay most all the data sources (for example I think my SEO for Firefox page is ranking at #10 in Google for SEO right now, but the page strength tool shows it as being at 3.5), but it is probably quite a bit more accurate than PageRank alone is.

Also interesting that on one front Google is requesting to look for ways to share as much data as they can with you while on other fronts they make external tools and ideas necessary and valuable because they are unwilling to share data they once shared. Thus markets which were once fairly open are getting more and more abstract. It happened with PageRank and SEO and now it is happening with AdWords too.