bring back my buggy slow keyword tool

I just don’t understand Yahoo sometimes…

You have a tool that gets used (ok, abused) by thousands upon thousands of advertisers. You make all your money from advertisers. One of the main reasons they are using that tool is to spend more. So…you kill it? How about at the very least continue giving your advertisers something they are craving while at the same time pushing your own agenda. I wouldn’t mind that.

Of course, I used it mainly for other purposes. inventory.overture.com was my favorite domain speculating tool. It sucked for heavily searched for terms, but it was beautiful for discovering some smaller keywords that weren’t yet hit by automated rank-checkers.

And. It was awesome for domain sleuthing.

My most frequent use of the overture tool was testing if a domain had type-in traffic. It was astonishingly accurate. It goes something like this. If you are into direct navigation domains you want to know how much type-in traffic a domain may have. Without having to go through the song-and-dance of asking the owner for log files, I had a quick and easy way to estimate if it was a good direct nav domain.

On domain forums you often heard of domain + ext. That’s exactly like it sounds…how many times domain.com was searched for. People use search as navigation…dumb people …and taking into account a steady rate of dumb to smart people (who type the domain in to the address bar), you could easily get a quick and dirty factor & estimation for type-ins on a given domain. Of course it mattered depending on industry & if it was developed or not…but still. Huge. These were not the queries that were affected by rank checking programs either, so you could feel fairly confident you had found something.

awww well…all good things come to an end. Domain speculating is dead anyway