Nick Garner

I love cool research tools, especially ones which are really insightful and free.

http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/

The MSN search funnel shows you searches a user does before and after a search for a particular keyword. Now to give this some context, I know of a company whicih charges about ??20,000 a year for their market intelligence servces and one of their big ‘sell’ points is that they can track how a user searches and what pathways they travel through – just like this great tool!

I think the major benefit of this tool is the way it can help you work out content themes i.e.

SEO =
search engine optimization
seo firm
altavista
seo company
search engine marketing company

Other intersting MSN AdLab tools:

Demographic Prediction Tool – predicts the demographics of searchers by keyword or site visitors by website
Online Commercial Intention Detection Tool – estimates the probability of a search query or web page being commercial, informational-transactional, or
Search Result Clustering Tool – clusters search results based on related topics

Zippy search engine

It’s a meta search engine, in other words it shows aggragated search results from 6 other engines.The thing I like about it is the way it gives you a fast comparison of any given site showing backlinks , alexa traffic (relatively meaningless) and other stuff. As ever I will test it further and seei f it graduates to my list of important tools.

http://www.zippy.co.uk/

I come across new search engine optimisation tools all the time and so I have created a page for tools that catch my eye, but with which I havent made up my mind with.

Keyword association

http://www.linkedwords.com

I havnt got my head around this tool yet, but as far as I can see the premise is that it looks at associated sites and keywords based on some sort of relevancy algorythm they have put together. i will investigate further!