Google has started blocking one of our IP addresses. We thought this might happen. We are prepared.

We could still gather data from them through other servers we have or other means entirely, but we’ve stopped all pinging of Google until this is resolved.

I apologize to those of you who have come to rely on our reports on Google rankings. Hopefully, we will have something back up ASAP. In the meantime, you can still use SearchRascal to view reports on Yahoo! and MSN Live rankings. And we’re still doing development on new features, with the expectation that everything will be back online very soon.

We know this is a useful service for many people, and we also want to keep this a legitimate operation. We will be contacting Google to see what’s up, dawg.

Finally, if anyone out there can help in any way, it would be much appreciated. We’d be looking for good contacts at Google to raise this issue with, people who have experience with similar situations, or anyone who has experience partnering with Google on similar applications.

Thanks for your patience. As always, stay tuned to this blog for updates.

Cesar, from StandardSociety.com asks:

Can you please tell me what you plan to accomplish with this seeing that other services like Compete, Quantcast, Google Adwords, Wordtracker, WebCEO, Alexa and whole slew of others have already done before.

Here’s the comment I tried to post, but was too long for his blog:

Cesar, we’re reading and listening.

Search Rascal is similar to the tools you list but actually serves a different purpose. Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast can tell you about a site’s traffic. Search Rascal focuses specifically on a site’s search rankings. A minor difference wording, but a huge difference in use.

The other tools you list are good for finding keywords to either advertise on or focus your content on. Search Rascal works in conjunction with these tools, but solves a different problem. For example, once you’ve used another tool to find out what keywords you should be targeting you can start following them in Search Rascal. This way, you can see how your site is improving based on the changes you made. And if you see your site going down in the rankings, you’ll know you need to do something the increase your rankings.

Once we get a lot of data in our system, we will be able to do some interesting things outside our core offering. For instance, we can generate a report comparing how two domains are moving up in search rankings across a series of terms, which would be about as valuable to marketers as Compete’s reports on traffic. You’ll be able to find “up and coming” sites to focus your advertising and partnership efforts on.

And we will have a lot of keyword data and know which keywords people are tracking. And so in this way we can suggest “popular keywords” in a similar manner to WordTracker, but using a different algorithm.

However, our focus will always be on allowing users to track search rankings for keywords they are interested in and follow how well their sites are ranking vs. their competitors.

I hope this helps clear things up. The site is young and we’re going to be releasing new features. So please chime in on our blog to let us know what you’d like to see.

This is a simple shot out to all those bloggers who’ve been kind enough to share Search Rascal with their readers. Thank you so much for the press and if there is anything we can do to return the favor, let me know!

Emily Chang - eHub

A great site that catalogs and briefly describes the new websites launching daily. Search Rascal got a great mention at the top of the April 17 list, and we were happy to see that the world of web start-ups was a little slow that week, keeping our site in the top 5 on eHub’s RSS feed for a few days.

100shiki.com

The site’s in Japanese, so although we don’t know the exact message that was posted on April 18, we are thankful for the publicity. We tried AltaVista’s Babel Fish translator and figured out a bit about the post — it’s a basic FYI as to what Search Rascal is all about.

Japan.Internet.com

This site looks to be a Japanese search engine. We got a special post in the Business News section on April 19. Again, we’re not entirely sure what the site or post is about, but looks like a nice commentary on the site, specifically about how it is a useful tool for the SEO crowd.

KillerStartups.com

KillerStartups provides detailed info and commentary about the all of the newest web startups. Their review was mostly positive, although they had some questions about our revenue-generating model and stickiness. We’re figuring out those two key pieces of the puzzle as I write… we’d love feedback on the features you all are looking for.

Fogliata.net

Another site not in English (I really need to learn a language other than Spanish, huh?!?), Fogliata posted an informational article about our new service.

UglyChart.com

We got a link mention in Ugly Chart’s April 10 links post.

StandardSociety.com

Another nice writeup about Search Rascal. They had some questions about how we differ from other sites that do the same thing — however we’ve actually not found another site that does what our site can do. Most competitors track a specific URL’s performance in a search ranking, not the movement of URLs within specific keyword searches. The distinction may be subtle, but we think it’s pretty meaningful.

While you’re waiting for our rascals to gather data on the terms you’re tracking, checkout these search phrases which we’ve been tracking for a little while now. This will give you an idea of what your report will look like in a few days/weeks/months.

wine
john mccain
barack obama
hillary clinton
ron paul
real estate
porn
investing blog
finance
granola
jason coleman
baseball

Now go run your own report.

Our plan is to offer some advanced reporting and features as part of a member account. Below are some things we’re thinking about, followed by a questionnaire. We’d really appreciate it if you answered our questions in a reply to this blog post. Thanks!

Here are some features we are considering:

• See reports for the top 50 (or top 100) results.
• Save (10, 20, 100, etc) queries for quick reference.
• A guarantee that queries a member is tracking will receive daily updates.
  (queries tracked by free users may need to be archived or dropped due to space/performance issues)
• Keep a list of websites (that you own/operate) that are highlighted in the results.
• Ability to do a “reverse lookup”, where you enter a web address and we’ll show you all of the search terms and rankings we have in our DB for that URL.
• More reports!
• Graphs of how one site’s ranking moves over time within a query’s search results.
• Custom time frames for reports.
• Ability to choose which “data center” a query is directed at… or which zip code the query is coming from. (for locally-sensitive searches)
• See related searches for your queries and how popular they are within Search Rascal.

Questions:

(1) How many search results would you like to see in your reports? 10, 50, 100?

(2) How many queries do you think you would want to track with Search Rascal? 1, 5, 10, 20, 100, 1,000?

(3) Are you ever going to look at the non-Google reports? Are there other search engines you’d like to track?

(4) How much would you be willing to pay for a Search Rascal member account? $0. $5/month. $10/month. $29.99/month. $100 per year?

(5) Are there any other features you’d like to see?

(6) Do you have any other questions?

Thanks so much. I’m hoping to make Search Rascal the best reporting tool of its kind. We really appreciate your help in doing that.

What is Search Rascal?

Search Rascal is a new service that allows you to track the top search results for keywords of your choice in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Live Search).

How to Use Search Rascal

Enter a search term you’d like to track in the search box above and click the “generate report” button. The default report will show you today’s top 10 results in Google. If we have previous data for the term you are searching for, we’ll also show comparison information about the rankings across the report’s time frame.

(Try one of these searches to see what the reports look like when we have data: wine, new york real estate, jason coleman.)

You can use the tabs to switch between a Daily, Weekly, or Monthly report (if available) and use the dropdown in the upper right to choose which search engine to use as a data source.

If we are not yet tracking your search (you’ll see a tracking for “0 days” message), we’ll start tracking it immediately. You can check back any time to see an updated report for your search term or phrase.

Why Would I Use Search Rascal

Search Rascal can be a useful tool for anyone wanting to keep tabs on how sites are ranking for specific search queries. SEO experts, web developers, and anyone with a website (or with a client with a website) will get some use out of this tool. You can use it to gather information about a particular website or for more general information on how a segment or category of sites are doing.

Even folks who often “ego search” their own name can use Search Rascal to see which websites rank in the top 10 results and how that changes over time.

This is Awesome. I Want More!

Great! We’re planning on expanding the site over the next couple of weeks based on user feedback. We plan to offer the current functionality free-of-charge as long as we can, however tracking all of these queries require lots of processing power and DB space, so we hope to launch a member version as soon as possible.

Member Version

That’s right. I said “member version”. We need your feedback on what features to offer and how much you are willing to pay. So please reply to this blog post AND answer our questionnaire here.

Here are some features we are considering:

• See reports for the top 50 (or top 100) results.
• Save (10, 20, 100, etc.) queries for quick reference.
• A guarantee that queries a member is tracking will receive daily updates.
  (queries tracked by free users may need to be archived or dropped due to space/performance issues)
• Keep a list of websites (that you own/operate) that are highlighted in the results.
• Ability to do a “reverse lookup”, where you enter a web address and we’ll show you all of the search terms and rankings we have in our DB for that URL.
• More reports!
• Graphs of how one site’s ranking moves over time within a query’s search results.
• Custom time frames for reports.
• Ability to choose which “data center” a query is directed at… or which zip code the query is coming from. (for locally-sensitive searches)
• See related searches for your queries and how popular they are within Search Rascal.

Let us know what you think!

We hope you enjoy Search Rascal and that we can continue to offer this service. Let us know what you think by replying below or using our contact form. Cheers!