SmallBusinessNewz

I’m big on reputation management tracking. I have well over 50 Google alerts set up at any one time.

I track my own name, company name, blog name, names of my employees, names of my competitors, company names of my competitors and even my articles. All via Google Alerts.

So you know I had to be interested when I got an email about trackur, a new reputation monitoring tool from Andy Beal.

Here is what I like about trackur:

Trackur goes beyond just Google content. It tracks images, videos, Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter, as well as the usual news and blog stuff. Users can view their results using a cool AJAX enabled interface and get updates via email or RSS. You can save multiple searches, add filter keywords, save discovered items, and sort the results the way you want.

Ok, that’s quite a bit. I especially like the part about getting your info via RSS. That’s pretty cool.

So I gave it a test run on a search for my name and my company name. “Stoney deGeyter” only produced 22 search results using trackur dating all the way back to March of 2007. A Google search for my name produces about 35,000 results. Similarly, a trackur search for “Pole Position Marketing” produced 26 results going all the way back to December of 2006 while a Google search gives me over 21,000.

Doing some more comparisons, for “Pole Position Marketing” Google produces 230 image results and 17 blog results. My own name produced over 1,200 blog results, a few video results (thanks Sage!) and another 300 images.

Ultimately, trackur didn’t give me anything I didn’t already know about. Reading the FAQ page they believe trackur will discover 99% of the information out there. Google does a pretty good job of finding stuff too.

But unlike Google, trackur comes with a price tag that is, well, pretty steep.

To monitor a single search you’re going to pay $88 per month. That’s about what I might expect to pay for a full year subscription, and the option of tracking at least five keywords. trackur has two other pricing options, $188 per month for five searches and $388 for 15 searches.

If trackur will be able to find more information than I can get from Google Alerts and substantially quicker then I can see the value in the service for larger corporations. But on the individual/small business level I just don’t see the value or return in paying the rather substantial monthly fee. I’m open to be convinced, but I wasn’t during the 14-day trial.