Here is a short list of tools that can be used to spy on your competitors on the web. Some tools from the list issued by twitter SeoBlackOut whom I thank.
This article is an automated translation of a French Article I wrote. Read the original article (French)
Find all sites of a competitor:
To find your competitors’ sites, several solutions exist. The simplest is to make the Reverse Lookup the IP address of the server. All sites hosted by the same server will be returned. For that you have available
You Get the Signal: has several features on its website (such as IP geolocalization or a traceroute online). The feature that interests us, the reverse IP lookup still basic compared to others but useful enough for most cases.
DomainTools: Domain Tools offers many services dedicated to DNS. From whois to Reverse IP Lookup Server, offering free DomainTools is really interesting.
Finally, more advanced, it is possible to trace the owner of the site through advertising or adsense. SpyOnWeb is only based on Google Adsense, but it is possible to use other evidence (if you know of other tools -> comment).
Find the story of a domain name:
A very interesting feature of Domain Tools is the domain’s information history recording . With this you can sometimes find the name of the owner of a domain that is now hidden. Interesting when you want to contact an owner who hides his WHOIS information. For this you can check the history of a field.
Then, more known, you can consult the archives of the web to see the look of the website a few months / years: http://www.archive.org
Locate the owner of an email:
The reverse email services are all paid for (at least those I could find online). Two products have caught my attention that I have not tested and therefore urge you to be cautious.
For a reasonable price (2euros/months) emailfinder.com allows you to get basic information on an email address: full name, social media, e-etc.
For a fairly exhorbitant prices ($ 80 minimum the request), and techniques more or less legal (I do not know how what they propose is legal because it seems to break any notion of privacy) , EmailRevealer offers larger features.
Find a person on the web:
A classic now in our Web evolving Society : find information on a person. Google is always a good solution, but for the rest, various online people search tools exist. The one I choosed seems quite interesting 123people.com. (expired service). The problem (or not … it depends) is that, once your search is done, it saves cached results, and google this archive page. So if 123people.com appears in the google answers for your name, it means that someone has already done a search about you.
Find all occurrences of an image online:
TinyEye.com offers a handy service for the designer or photographer wanting to defend their intellectual property. The reverse image search allows you to find the websites where a given image appears on. The algorithm ‘watch’ the image and looks in its database instances that are closer.
A point to note is that there is also a firefox plugin (or IE) to tinyeye.
On a slightly less useful can be used Picollator for faces.
Bonus:
- Find a word from its definition: OneLook – Reverse Dictionary
- Find music by whistling / singing Midomi
…. What about you, do you use other resources?