Re: 2 out of topic questions

Bob,

They distribute a generic search toolbar for IE that gives them the data they are using. In my post I mentioned it would be nice to have some meta-search data for a head start... they are getting that and then some.

I believe they also offer a toolbar toolkit that anyone can download and use to create a customized and redistributable IE toolbar. That gives them what is probably a pretty effective viral distribution mechanism.

As far as technically copying their scheme... it's not that difficult. A toolbar, BHO or other program using something like IESniffer from UtilMin/AppControls (www.appcontrols.com) could easily generate the required data for IE... although FireFox plugins would require a separate solution.

The *much* bigger challenge is replicating their reach. Not easy. If you were looking to acquire the data for a smaller or more directly accessible group it's probably more feasible. But a mass market reach like that would take something special to attain.


Wealth and Abundance,

Matt Harward

Bob D. wrote:
Hello,

thanks for your reply. It was brilliant.
But I have a question regarding Competitive Intelligent I mentioned on my original post.
They claim they can find the keywords people use in google or other search engines to
find out competitive sites. They dont just search for they "bidding words" (ad campaigns).
That's why their service requires 15 days to start returning results. I believe they use
a background program installed to million of users around the world and they collect
their surfing history. Otherwise its impossible to know the site's keyphrases without
actually having access to it. Am I wrong?

Bob

"Matt Harward" <mharward@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:46d104d2$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Bob,

Regarding your 1st question...

Try places like rentacoder.com, elance.com, guru.com, etc. There are lots of sites that specialize in just such things. Even more traditional sites like monster.com and careerbuilder.com work well, depending on your needs.

Regarding your 2nd question...

There are several sites like the one you mentioned. KeyCompete.com and SpyFu.com are two that come to mind. SpyFu.com is, in my opinion, the best of what's out there for competitive bidding resources.

And there are far more advanced systems that go quite a bit further... Google Cash Detective, for example, is like a business-in-a-box for tracking and swiping profitable ad campaigns.

While the information they collect is entirely legal, the way they do it is usually against the TOS of sites like Google that prohibit screen scraping, spiders, and electronic storage.

It is possible to do it yourself... but really not worth the effort. Much easier to simply subscribe to a service like SpyFu.com to get your information. Otherwise you're getting into massive keyword databases with multiple Google requests daily for each keyword to build your database.

I have quite a bit of experience with it (from a marketing standpoint) and what kind of information you'd need to gather and track. There's no shortcut to the information either. You figure out the keywords by brute force... run as many searches as you can and see who shows up where.

There are a handful of tricks you can use to discover the actual search terms they're bidding on... but it's still just like a brute force attack on Google to determine what advertisers are bidding on.

It would be a whole lot easier if you had a meta-search database to start from. But you would still run into TOS issues with Google and likely need either a very wide network of servers to do the searching or a reliable private proxy network to do the grunt work if you didn't want Google to block you very quickly.

If you still have specific questions on how they work behind the scenes or the actual technical requirements needed to do something similar in Delphi I'd be happy to fill in the blanks.


Wealth and Abundance,

Matt Harward


Bob D. wrote:
Hello,

sorry for the out of topic question but that's the only place/forum I read/post/monitor...

a) we are looking to hire some people for our company tech-support needs. is there any site that companies or people post for jobs? the issue is that we need people to work remotely not in real office.

b) there are some sites (like that one http://ci.trellian.com/index.html) that can collect information from your competitors domains and tell you what keywords are used and which search engines refers to. Is that legal? Is that possible to retrieve that information by myself? Anyone has some experience on that please guide me.

Thanks
Bob


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: 2 out of topic questions
    ... They claim they can find the keywords people use in google or other search ... best of what's out there for competitive bidding resources. ... that can collect information from your competitors domains and tell you ...
    (borland.public.delphi.thirdpartytools.general)
  • Datetimepicker in the Toolbar
    ... Does someone know a nice way to add a datetimepicker-control to a toolbar. ... I dont find a solution with google. ... (wrong keywords?) ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp)
  • Re: Check keyword density for URL with https
    ... > with low keyword density beating out a site, in the rankings, that has ... > their site ranking better thataway. ... I had top positions at Google about 1-2 years ago. ... > those keywords when all they are doing is putting up essentially blank ...
    (alt.internet.search-engines)
  • [NEWS] Exploiting the Google Toolbar
    ... The following security advisory is sent to the securiteam mailing list, and can be found at the SecuriTeam web site: http://www.securiteam.com ... Google is a popular and precise search engine. ... vulnerabilities have been found in the Google toolbar allowing a remote ... This method is not perfect for the attacker since there is no way to know ...
    (Securiteam)
  • Exploiting the Google toolbar (GM#001-MC)
    ... Google toolbar version 1.1.58 and prior. ... Enable features with privacy implications. ... This method is hardly perfect for the attacker since there's no way to know ...
    (NT-Bugtraq)