Best search marketing tool of 2008 so far
Via searchengineland, some fantastic person has created a tool which aggregates data for page views on Wikipedia; you can search for any page that exists on Wikipedia and see daily traffic stats for that page in a number of given months.
The awesomeness of this should not be underestimated; what we’re basically seeing here is a vague estimation of the kind of traffic you can expect for a number of keywords if you reach the top ~5 in Google and Yahoo. Obviously being Wikipedia this is slanted towards information-style queries (which we see had 53k views in February), so its commercial value could be debated, but with a bit of lateral thinking this kind of info could probably be applied to anything - especially looking into the potential of niche markets.
With Overture’s keyword tool dead for over a year now, this is a very welcome addition to a search marketer’s array of research tools, and with talk of an API for this info in progress, I think this is an almost unprecedented gateway for the average search marketer/webmaster into overall traffic volumes on the web (barring AOL’s search info leak).
