Themezoom is easily the most exciting piece of research software that I use and for me the beta's ability to reveal the larger market in one big bite makes it especially valuable.

Another interesting tool that I've found and that I think others may find valuable is Microsoft AdCenter Lab's Detecting Online Commercial Intention (OCI) tool. As most of us have learned, there's a world of difference in the profitability of the keywords that we use, beginning with what we know about the longtail. When I say "beginning with the longtail" I mean that for me and the work that I do, longtails are far from a guarantee of profitability, and I usually have to spend a lot of (mostly client) PPC money to arrive at the relative handful of individual keywords that actually make anybody any money. Which makes the concept of OCI interesting to me.

At the "Detecting Online Commercial Intention" page http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/OCI.aspx you can enter a keyword or website and, according to the tool's authors, establish within  90% accuracy the commercial, navigational or informational intent of the searcher.

The paper that the tool is based on reveals that it draws conclusions from several criteria that many of us already use in non-automated ways.

• The most obvious of these is the presence of commercial language in the search term, so that for example keywod phrases that include words like "deal, cheap, buy, sell, sale" are more likely to be commercial in nature.
• The tool also looks at the content of the top ranked landing pages that come up for the search term, so in effect uses competitive intelligence to apply a value to it.
• The tool then looks at the length and content of the search results that come up for the search term, including the presence of sponsored results.

What's interesting here is that the algorithm automates some basic online marketing research processes and then assigns a per-keyword value to the result.

And so the question for me would be- at the level of searcher intent - whether the OCI algorithm could be incorporated into Themezoom's Organic Ranking Value as a way to provide an additional indication of keyword value.

At the very least, if the tool actually provides a 90% level of accuracy, I'm going to begin experimenting on a keyword-by-keyword basis with Themezoom keyword data to see whether the keyword sifting process can be made faster, cheaper or more effective.