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.
