Myriad Search (myriadsearch.com) is an interesting search engine research tool created by the guy who runs seobook.com. It lets you run a search query and generate a list of results that are a combination of rankings in four major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. So the tool has several uses:

• Competitive research. Who are your competitors that rank highly across the board for desireable search phrases?
• Link partner research. Sites that come up highly in the composite rankings for keywords related to your industry may be very valuable sources of links.
• To find out your own standing. If you rank highly here, then you likely have strong visibility in the search engines.
• General research. A site that ranks highly in the composite rankings is likely a strong source of information related to your search query.

One unique aspect of the tool is that it allows you emphasize or de-emphasize search engines (using a control called “bias”), and results can be weighted based on total number of results. For instance, if you specify to run the query based on 50 results, then a number one ranking has less weight than a query based on 10 results. These different ways of running queries allow you to take into consideration factors such as:

• Particular search engines being more relevant than others for some searches.
• Some searches being less sensitive to having a top-10 or top-20 ranking than others.
• Some search engines allowing duplicate results, which would tend to skew results.

The tool also allows you to download a .CSV file of your research data.

Myriad Search is a very interesting tool that gives you a unique perspective on search data related to your business. We recommend you give it a try.

For help conducting search engine research for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.