Any free tools out there to perform backlink lookup for non-site-owners? i.e. given a page, show me a listing of pages that link <i>to</i> that page?<p>I'm thinking like a hackernews comments button, but generalized to the entire internet.<p>Reasoning:<p>I'd like a discovery tool that, given a blog post, reveals the community of other <i>blog posts</i> as responses. There are tools that show you <i>comments</i> given a page, but if I want to observe slow, considered discussion, blog posts are probably a better medium.<p>Feels like something google would be able to provide, given the basics of how pagerank is supposed to work. But searching around it seems this is only exposed through webmaster tools for the site owner, and even then I'm not sure it would give me quite the search functionality I seek.
Pretty much all of the tools available require payment in order to see useful results. I remember Backlink Watch being an exception to this a long time ago, but it doesn't appear to exist anymore