Toolbar backlinks reliability

Apologies if this question has already been posed, but I am new here and new to the game in general.
It's just a question regarding the backlinks button in the Google toolbar. How reliable are the results it throws up, because I seem to be getting some very low counts off of it for topranking sites, even when dispensing with the option to ignore similar links.

Thanks in advance.

Google only ever shows a very small sample of back links for a site. Yahoo site explorer is a much better option for studying back links, or if it's your own site you're looking at, then use the Google webmaster tools (still rarely as up to date as Yahoo, but much better organised).

Cheers for the help jagnet.

No worries

i guess upon observation and uses different tool to check my back link, they are giving me different result. so id better to choose in manually checking, and though the gg doesn't give a exact result base on back links. so i never consider it accurate stat of my backlinks.

google tool bar doesnt show all back links. so if you want to see all back links for your site u can do it manually.

Try linkdomain:example.com in Yahoo.

You can also use some tool to check backlinks....try searchstatus...