Google has always given only a partial analysis of the links pointing to any particular site. However, they have now improved the ability to look at backlinks at least to your own site, using Google’s webmastertools.
According to a post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.
To make this data even more useful, we have divided the world of links into two types: external and internal. Let’s understand what kind of links fall into which bucket.
google webmaster tools
Google webmaster tools are incredibly useful, but I find that it is really slow at showing links from other sites. Other SEO analysers show the links that webmaster tools doesnt. Not sure if this means that google is ignoring some of them.