GoogSpy - How does it work!?

Discussion in 'Products & Tools' started by Epica, Jul 22, 2005.

  1. #1
    www.GoogSpy.com
    Okay - I've just barely ran across this site (thanks to a friend and fellow DPer).

    Immediately my responce was "Sweet tool!", but the very next thing to come to mind was - How the heck do they do this? So I hopped on DP Forums (since DPers know EVERYTHING) and did a search of the forums.

    Of the four mentions of GoogSpy no one talked about how it works - so I'm left wondering 'Is it so obvious that I'm the only moron who can't figure it out'..?

    I get how a tool could supply a ranking for a site accross search engines if I supply the keyword. (like the DP Keyword Tracker) I could even understand if I gave it a particular page to research - with time it could scan the title, meta keyword, and content word density - then parse search results for these terms and report where that URL ranks for those terms.

    But this tool appears to find rankings in reverse and QUICK.

    The tool tells me all the words that any page on my site ranks for - even if those words are not the highest density, or even included in the title, meta data or alt text. In fact one page ranks for a 2 word phrase that appears only 3 times on the entire page, yet the tool was able to figure out that this page ranks for that term.

    I'm no programmer, but I use SEO tools constantly - I had no idea this was possible - now how do they do it..?
     
    Epica, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  2. Googles76

    Googles76 Peon

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    #2
    what exaclty is this tool suppose to do? I entered a few pages on my site in it but it comes up with blank.
     
    Googles76, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  3. stimpsy

    stimpsy Well-Known Member

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    #3
    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.
     
    stimpsy, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  4. Epica

    Epica Well-Known Member

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    #4
    Yeah - I just discovered that it doesn't work for many 'below the radar' sites :( (so none of mine show up anything - heh ;))

    Try DigitalPoint.com for an example of what info it returns.

    Stimpsy -
    but where does it get the search words..?
     
    Epica, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  5. stimpsy

    stimpsy Well-Known Member

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    #5
    However, It's pretty weird.

    Do a search for cia.gov
    Then click on the left on cia.gov

    You will the list of keywords the CIA uses in Adwords.

    However, I cannot find the CIA for any of those keywords. But the site is listed in the top organic results. So, is it a tool to spy on your competitor's Adwords campaign, or their current search engine positioning?
     
    stimpsy, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  6. Epica

    Epica Well-Known Member

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    #6
    I thought maybe they were using the paid campaign match words list for a minute - but I have access to a few sites paid campaign including their match keywords and for the site mentioned above (2 word phrase on the page only 3 times) these words are not in their paid campaign match words.
     
    Epica, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  7. stimpsy

    stimpsy Well-Known Member

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    #7
    Try it out for ebay.com

    There is a huge number of organic results and PPC ads that Ebay currently ranks on.

    This is really dangerous tool..!
     
    stimpsy, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  8. Googles76

    Googles76 Peon

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    #8
    looks like it works for me, you jsut have to enter your site without the www. in front so just yoursite.com.

    I get a result that says I am ranked 8th for a term, while I am really not. It was a term that I probably ranked for a long time ago when I still had my affilate shop setup. This leads me to believe this tool might be using some sort of cached information to display this.
     
    Googles76, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  9. stimpsy

    stimpsy Well-Known Member

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    #9
    Of course they are using cached information. The guy downloads 500k pages a day(that's what they say in the article)
     
    stimpsy, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  10. biggazillakilla

    biggazillakilla Active Member

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    #10
    Hmmm... That is interesting. Make sure you click on the link they provide to get more information.

    This part would be scary if it weren't inaccurate:

    xyz.com Pays for these Google Adwords
     
    biggazillakilla, Jul 22, 2005 IP
  11. e10

    e10 Well-Known Member

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    #11
    It has weird results for me. It shows about 10 keywords from position 4 on but misses out a bunch that are at 1 and 2 which would be the more competitive.
     
    e10, Jul 22, 2005 IP