New web service tracks search ranking
I just discovered an awesome new Search Ranking reporting tool named SearchRascal. This sounds like a really nice service, but my main question is how is this site going to be able to track all the terms people are constantly searching? If they can keep up with that, they will be fine I think.
Granted that this service is new, I really struggle to imagine how profitable of an area this will be. It is a good idea, especially since it appears that you can save your keywords and such, but how useful will this really be? I really do hope it becomes a successful service. I guess I’m just used to the way Alexa presents you with a nice graph of the traffic of the particular website, which I think maybe a good idea for them to do with the keywords that way you see how much traffic that particular keyword is getting. Alexa does not do this, so it seems like an area that can be exploited. My main concern is the impact of knowing how long you have been ranked a certain way on Google, Yahoo! or Windows Live.
As I have said before, I really do hope this succeeds, and I really hope Alexa gets some competition. We will see in the coming months.
Josh, thanks for posting RE SearchRascal on your blog. I hope we succeed too.
To address your points:
If the site gets popular, it IS going to be hard keeping up with the number of keywords people are tracking. It takes about 30s each day to gather the data for each keyword. There are about 1440 seconds in a day, which means we can track about 3000 queries with one server. That’s not too much. Not to mention that we need to host the website front end, etc, on a server too.
We have some ideas to handle this… in no particular order:
(1) Get a paid members server launched ASAP. At something like $10 per member, it would take about 10 members to support 1 server or 3000 queries.
(2) Maybe we won’t update every keyword/query every day. Especially if a query already has a week or so of data, we might be able to get by just updating every week instead of every day. That’s 7x more queries.
(3) Of course, we will make sure to update daily any keyword in a member’s list. However, we’ll probably limit a member’s list of queries to 100 or so and charge more for more queries.
Also, your chart idea is great. We’d like to offer members more reports based on the data we’re gathering, including something like you are envisioning. I see someone entering a QUERY and a URL and then seeing a line chart of how the ranking changes over time. That would be very useful.
We’re waiting to get more approval and feedback from the community before building out the site, but we will be able to push it out quickly once we’re ready.
Keep your fingers crossed. Thanks again!
Jason Coleman
Stranger Studios, SearchRascal.com
BTW, I noticed this post by running a SearchRascal report for ourselves:
http://www.searchrascal.com/report?q=searchrascal
Thanks also for your comments on our blog.