| So, you want to know what your competitors
are up to these days, or maybe you want to research a keyword campaign that will rank you
at the top of the heap for whatever product or service you're selling? Meet GoogSpy, a
special search engine that not only shows you what Google AdWords your competitors are
buying, but it will display all of the search terms that rank them in the top 10, PLUS it
even displays their top 25 competitors.
What search engine does it base all of its intelligence
on?
Well, with a name like GOOGspy, there can only be one.
GoogSpy.com is powered by a product called "WebScraper+" which is the brainchild
of Arizona-based Velocityscape. According to Michael J. Roberts, Velocityscape's
President, GoogSpy extracts 500,000 search results per day from Google and loads them into
the GoogSpy.com database which it then makes available for anyone to search.
Normally, when it comes to business intelligence software,
a sentence which read: "which it then makes available for anyone to search."
would end with the phrase "for a fee.", but that's not the case with GoogSpy. At
least for the time being the tool is 100% free to use by anyone who cares to go to
http://www.GoogSpy.com and use it.
So, what's the value of such a powerful tool for the
average business web site operator? That depends upon how much value you place on being
able to see how a competitor spends their advertising dollar and who else is competing
with them.
The interface is fairly straight forward. You enter your
search term in the text box and click the "Search button. If GoogSpy finds content it
will display the company name, if any, as a hyperlink under the company heading and the
search terms, also as hyperlinks, under the Search terms heading. If it doesn't find
anything then it doesn't display anything. For about two minutes more development time the
programmers could have added a "Sorry, your search term did not return any
results" message but I guess less is more with these guys.
The fact that they are still building their database is
apparent when you enter some company names that should be found yet are not. However, when
a hit IS found, the information is spot on. On top of that, the tool is pretty good at
ferreting out things you wouldn't normally consider. For example, do a search on CIA.gov
and you'll discover that the CIA buys several AdWords in Google. Now that's spying!
They also have an option to browse by Company and Search
Term, but the interface for doing that is relatively useless for a serious search.
However, it can be a lot of fun if you're simply killing time and want to see what you can
see.
It takes a few minutes of clicking around before you get
the hang of what you are reading and how powerful a tool this really is. If you are
working on an advertising or marketing plan, whether it be one that you'll really use, or
one that your banker wants to see, be sure to make a few passes through GoogSpy.com to see
what the rest of the your market is doing and how much they're spending. It will be worth
the trip.
Copyright 2005 Sandra Stammberger |
