What search engine does it base all of its intelligence on? Well, with a name like GOOGspy, there can only be one. GoogSpy.com is powered by a product called "WebScraper+" which is the brainchild of Arizona-based Velocityscape. According to Michael J. Roberts, Velocityscape's President, GoogSpy extracts 500,000 search results per day from Google and loads them into the GoogSpy.com database which it then makes available for anyone to search.

Normally, when it comes to business intelligence software, a sentence which read: "which it then makes available for anyone to search." would end with the phrase "for a fee.", but that's not the case with GoogSpy. At least for the time being the tool is 100% free to use by anyone who cares to go to http://www.GoogSpy.com and use it.

So, what's the value of such a powerful tool for the average business web site operator? That depends upon how much value you place on being able to see how a competitor spends their advertising dollar and who else is competing with them.

The interface is fairly straight forward. You enter your search term in the text box and click the "Search button. If GoogSpy finds content it will display the company name, if any, as a hyperlink under the company heading and the search terms, also as hyperlinks, under the Search terms heading. If it doesn't find anything then it doesn't display anything. For about two minutes more development time the programmers could have added a "Sorry, your search term did not return any results" message but I guess less is more with these guys.

The fact that they are still building their database is apparent when you enter some company names that should be found yet are not. However, when a hit IS found, the information is spot on. On top of that, the tool is pretty good at ferreting out things you wouldn't normally consider. For example, do a search on CIA.gov and you'll discover that the CIA buys several AdWords in Google. Now that's spying!

They also have an option to browse by Company and Search Term, but the interface for doing that is relatively useless for a serious search. However, it can be a lot of fun if you're simply killing time and want to see what you can see.

It takes a few minutes of clicking around before you get the hang of what you are reading and how powerful a tool this really is. If you are working on an advertising or marketing plan, whether it be one that you'll really use, or one that your banker wants to see, be sure to make a few passes through GoogSpy.com to see what the rest of the your market is doing and how much they're spending. It will be worth the trip.