Fundamental to SEO is the ability to track links to your site. Especially since the search engines give preference to offsite optimization, compared to onsite measure.
Typical backlink tracers like SEO Elite and iwebtool give linear tabular reports.
What I liked about TouchGraph’s GoogleBrowser is the ability to visualize the links in 3D.
Witness:
The GoogleBrowser is interactive, meaning you’ll be able to zoom in on a cluster, isolate inbound and outblound links and check out high authority sites you’re linked to.
Obviously, this tool has competitive intelligence functions in allowing you to
scope out the source of authority sites linked to a competitors site.
Alternatively if you’re an affiliate marketer, it gives you an easy way to identify other super affiliates marketing a product (obviously, they’d backlink to the sales page on the product owners site).
Does GoogleBrowser invalidate other SEO products?
Hardly. It gives you a framework to look at links, and more importantly analyze high authority site which are linked to you. It won’t easily replace the other features you’d find in Brad Callen’s SEO Elite, or provide the depth of information you’d find in Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.
[Thanks to Reefer420 for highlighting this resource in the WickedFire Guide to SEO thread]
Very interesting Andrew, thanks for linking the information. I know I was looking at Google’s Zeitgeist yesterday – do you use it for any data collection?