Zippy’s design is similar to Technorati’s new design, with a minimalist white background and lots of bright colors. The site is pretty easy to use, and has a slick feel with the help of some ajax. It took only a few minutes worth of playing around to really get a grasp on the functionality. However, a tutorial or features page, would be nice to help introduce the functionally to a new user.

The basic search functionality for Zippy queries Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask and mashes the results together. It then ranks the results among the four.

As you can see from the screenshot there’s plenty more going on than just meta search. First, Zippy shows related searches from each search engine to help find other like keyword phrases. Next, it takes all of those results and shows which pages are in multiple search engines (if any) and ranks them down the page. The results in more than one search engine (ie. Google and Yahoo and MSN) will rank higher.

You can find more about each result’s domain if you click the little orange arrow next to the term. (You can also access this via the sidebar or the homepage.) This will return a plethora of useful information about the domain like age, IP, sites on IP, Google PageRank, all sorts of backlink data, and Alexa rank.

You can get even more detailed data about any domain if you do a Domain Information search. This is where Zippy really shines as you can find:

• The domain’s top 100 ranking keywords (with higher-ranked terms weighted heavier)
• Server info (IP, file size, whether it uses compression)
• Text information (title, meta-description, words found in headings, bold and italics, internal and external links, ratio of external to internal links, and linked external domains)
• The total of 2, 3 and 4 word phrases
• The textual content of the homepage

You can also search the top 10 sites for a keyword. This feature shows an Alexa graph for the top five domains and their traffic, followed the used tags for each domain. This table shows each tag (ie < title >, < h1 >, etc.) and the number of words per tag, number of keyword occurrences, and the keyword density. Below that shows the top 10 domains’ backlink and search engine index information across the main four search engines plus Alexa and Technorati data.

Another feature is domain comparison. Basically you can pit any two domains against each other and it will show the Alexa information plus backlink and index information, much like the domain search mentioned above.

Zippy is a handy tool for doing quick market research for free. The fact that you don’t have to use multiple tools to get the same amount of data helps the speed the process up quite a bit. It’s fairly simple to use, but could use a little more information or direction for the new user.

Speaking of SEO tools, Jim Boykin has recently updated WeBuildPages Top Ten Analysis SEO Tool (formally Cool SEO Tool). You can read all the details at jimboykin.com.

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

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