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AdWords Keyword Sandbox Tool And Un-Exhaustible Commons Theory : 5ubliminal's TellinYa

<a href="http://www.tellinya.com/art2/333/">AdWords Keyword Sandbox Tool And Un-Exhaustible Commons Theory : 5ubliminal's TellinYa</a>
5ubliminal's YAMS

No Such Un-Exhaustible Commons

First let's understand commons. I've talked about commons a short while ago and right now I'm having an argument with GAB from SEOROI about this very subject.

He wants to release a tool for free. No problem here as I've done it too but there is a catch. His tool taps into the commons. Actually … Yahoo!'s commons. My tools don't use shared resources and that's why they are free. When I'll publish tools that share resources they'll be costy so I'll make sure those commons don't get too abused.

Regarding our argument GAB told me that:

This tool's only limitation would be bandwidth/hosting/queries to Yahoo.

And I was wondering. Isn't Yahoo!'s API a common? Not even nature has over-use-immune commons (e.g.: water, clean air)! He also offended my readership for being too low: maybe … Few But Smart … just as I like it!

I have full respect for Yahoo!

They send me really little fraffic but they provide something more important then visitors:) to us, their public access API. Google used to do something like this a while ago but they don't anymore but Yahoo! is there for the SEO community and that has my full respect. Holding up a heavy-duty over-abused service with little benefits for them is something not easily found in today's buck-hungry search companies.

Yahoo!'s API covers a wide selection of services that I consider vital for the SEO developers and they are the last flickering light between the SEO Community and pitch black. They allow us to do searches, link analysis, content analysis and so much more!

I've really gone off-roadtopic here. What about AdWords?
Bedtime story about Google Sandbox:
I bet that I can get some free services closed real fast just by releasing some free tools … But I won't:)

A while ago I was doing 'keyword research' (to be read violent scraping) on the AdWords Sandbox External Keyword Tool. This was happening few days before the Captcha kicked in. One day I woke up, started the software and noticed it didn't return results anymore. I opened the page in the browser and I was shocked. They had a Captcha. I was devastated but, fortunately, I had the technical abilities to proceed without actually breaking the Captcha. But most others didn't.

Truth is I somehow feel guilty for that as I don't believe in coincidences and I wasn't really nice to them. And had some friends using the same tool. You wanna know why they removed it? Overload! Everytime that page returned it's JS compatible results using Ajax it returned an average of 700KB - 1MB of data. 1000 queries meant 1GB of data and 1000 people doing 1000 queries was 1TB of data. Figure that for an 'un-exhaustible resource'.

Are others doing keyword research on it right now? Yes but very few and very light compared to the dark-past and that was the actual goal.

Make access to commons very difficult so they'll be used by only those who have the skills for they are few!

16 Comments Posted By Readers :

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#1 Dan from United States
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
You should check out the MSN Ad Intelligence plugin for excel. It's probably the best keyword research tool around and it has the most accurate data.

Of course, there is a catch. They only track the top million search terms which means if it has around 20 or less queries a month they don't track.

Keyword generation might be great but really long tail terms won't necessarily give you any data.
#2 Adam from European Union
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
Now, the part about proceeding with keyword research on the Google tool without having to break the captcha is really interesting. I am thinking about it but cannot see the solution. Could you possibly give a hint as to where one should be going? :)

For the rest, I totally agree with you. If you share something valuable by giving people a blueprint or even a freeware, the method is bound to die.

Keep up the good work, your blog is truly great!
#3 5ubliminal web
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
@Dan: Do you by any chance need an advertiser account with MS AdCenter for it to work :)?
PS: See why I like my subscribers…

@Adam: I don't know if I should hint you. It's something not meant for the masses;)
PS: I think we're neighbours you know… I'm a bit to the east.
#4 Papa Rage from United States
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
I have also noticed goog putting up captchas out of the blue to protect resources I was "researching" .

It seems like a self correcting system to me. Make a resource free/cheap, it gets abused, protect it or take it down.

It might be painful if Yahoo! pulled the plug on site research and back link checking, but the people with skills would still come out on top. Arguably those of us who can figure things out might be farther ahead of the pack as free and easy resources disappear from the landscape.
#5 5ubliminal web
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
@Papa Rage: Very good pov (point of view)! Killing the free easy to access resources would eliminate the noob script kiddies that litter the web in vain. TRUE!
#6 Papa Rage from United States
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
But the fact is that we need the noob script kiddies don't we. We need google/msn/yahoo to feel warm and fuzzy about their new algo that eliminates 91% of web spam.
#7 5ubliminal web
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
Yeah …they should be able to defeat someone to feel manly:)
#8 Dan from United States
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
@5ub yes you do need an account. I don't know if its free to sign up or if you have to put a minimum 5 bucks in your account but it's worth it.

Here's one feature alone that is worth any hassle. You can put in a keyword and then build off of it based on what people bidding on that keyword are bidding on. So you can automatically see what words are being bid on by your competitors.

They do have some privacy protection that keeps really small pools from seeing eachother but if there are more than two or three advertisers you can grab the bid pools.
#9 5ubliminal web
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
Thanks a lot. I'll check it out today!
#10 Adam from Belgium
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
5ubliminal: I've read the post on automating IE but I obviously still need to learn to grasp the meaning of your hint. : Thanks for it anyway, I'll keep on learning and playing with your codes.

Yes, I thought we were neighbours when I saw you commenting in a language that reminded me to the language of a neighbouring country of which name starts with an R. :) Am I right?
#11 5ubliminal web
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
:) True! IE programming is all about COM programming and it's not easy to learn.
I've never been interested in COM programming but had to learn enough to use the IE browser at will and it all paid up. It's not for anyone… it's really hard in C++ but much easier in VB or VB.NET.
#12 Adam from Belgium
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
Great, it's good to see that there are really smart SEOs from this emerging part of the world as well. I have some good friends from your country, whom I work with in yet another country in Western Europe :), but this you can also see from my IPs. Anyway, I just wanted to tell again that I'm really impressed by the quality of stuff you discuss on this blog. It is really inspiring, especially for a guy like me looking for ways to set feet in the world of SEO. Sure the sample codes are useful, but even more important is that your posts make me think your tricks and methods further. They're like a good can of Red Bull for the SEO-part of my brain. :)

Keep up the good work and all the best!
#13 5ubliminal web
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
Thanks and you too :)
PS: I really need to get a blushing smiley in here.
PPS: When I won't put your mind to work anymore I'll work your wallet ;)
#14 5ubliminal web
Posted on Wednesday, 26 March, 2008
@DAN: Today is awesome and you are awesome ;)
#15 Yours truly (Gab) from Canada
Posted on Friday, 28 March, 2008
Hey 5ub,

I didn't realize at first that you were referring to Yahoo's API as commons. Good point, and I'll have to take it into consideration now that you mention it. ATM, I'm leaning away from a free release anyways, so it may not be an issue, but thanks for the education anyways :).

Incidentally, Yahoo limits your querying capacity, afaik. So they've already protected their resource, no?
#16 5ubliminal web
Posted on Friday, 28 March, 2008
A query to Yahoo API for search results returns over 100KB for 1 page of 100 results. 1000 users x 100KB = 100 MB x 5000 Queries = 500.000MB (500GB = 0.5TB)
This is why not everyone should use them at wide scale.
PS: I bet there are way, way more users. And I can send over 250.000 queries daily as I have a dynamic IP and could easily switch 50 daily;)
Yes they do protect themselves but I'm used not to take anything for granted.
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