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!