fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

(rt) Every SEO should be aware of what search terms their (or their clients’) competitors are bidding on – this has been common SEO / SEM knowledge for the better part of a decade. However, actually getting hold of this type of crucial data has been a daunting, time consuming task to date: the search engines won’t tell you, and neither, of course, will your competitors. So a lot, a great lot of manual elbow grease was required to meet this requirement.

Enter GoogSpy by Velocityscape: this neat (and – unbelievably – currently free!) tool automates it all. Scraping Google for about half a million searches a day, it’s easy to imagine the sheer size of their database.

This is from their → press release:

↗ GoogSpy.com … answers the fundamental question of search engine marketers: “What Adwords do my competitors use?” On ↗ GoogSpy.com …, simply type in a competitor’s name and see all ads they buy. It also displays the search terms that they naturally rank in the top ten and it even computes the company’s top 25 competitors. GoogSpy offers such devilish insight into your competitor’s playbook that you’ll catch yourself whispering and looking over your shoulder for the rest of the week.
[…]
“I read all those Search Engine Optimization Tips & Tricks articles,” says Michael J. Roberts, Velocityscape’s President, “and each one said ‘Find out which search terms your competitors use.’ I thought, ‘That seems obvious, but how?’ Apparently, the ‘best practice’ was guess-and-check. There had to be a better way. With Web Scraper Plus+ we extracted a million search results and built a proof of concept in a few days.”

What they don’t address is the question of how Google is taking to all this – no mention of APIs or special agreements, let alone the usual sales bot speak of “strategic partnership blah blah”. After all, eEven by search behemoth standards, half a million automated queries per day are truly a lot and in view of → Google’s recent track record of incapacitating automatic queries, it stands to reason that this is a pretty risky venture if pursued without the search engine’s explicit permission. So we wouldn’t bet the farm on their being online much longer, though obviously we wish them well with their service.

On the downside, bear in mind that what you can do is open to your competitors, too: anyone can check your own AdWord bids and draw appropriate conclusions. If you don’t want that to happen, you’ll have to sign up for AdWords under someone else’s name or employ an agency to do it for you. Even then, your target URL will still be pretty easy to discern. This may create some seriously bad feelings among the advertising community yet – expect it to hit the headlines fairly soon.

GoogSpy has been offline a lot recently (which expectably led to some speculation whether Google had had them canned for violation of their TOS), and at time of writing they are displaying the following notice with a graphics link indicating their server load:

GoogSpy.com is currently undergoing an upgrade to deal with the
dramatic increase in traffic. Some of the search results may be incomplete while
we rebuild the index on the new server.

Check it out here:
→ GoogSpy

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