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.