These surface on the SEO underground every once in a while. I personally don't think the data is that valuable except for getting less-than-savvy folks to pay scads of money for a CSV file (present company excepted, most folks who buy this are going to be the DigitalPoint "How do I make $1 a day with AdSense!?" crowd that buy most Make Money Online products).
That said, the existence of lists like this always makes me shoot a baleful glare in the general direction of Google's "transparency." They are very happy to give away all the rest of the world's information, but anything Big G thinks is commercially sensitive for Google is guarded like Fort Knox. (Did you know AdSense users can't even tell you the CPC rates they get without violating the TOS?)
You've hit the nail on the head. I didn't really want to bring up that issue, but I'm glad that you did. Google also makes it against their TOS to automatically crawl their search content: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...
IMHO, that's patently absurd considering the business they are in.
re: transparency:
In what other business would it be remotely okay to not talk about the purchase price, or the sales price of an item? That's just patently silly.
And, the transparency really only gets worse the closer you get to Google headquarters. I can't tell you how many Googlers that I end up having brief chat's with, that can't talk about what they do or what they are working on in more than very vague terms. It's creepy.
re: I personally don't think the data is that valuable except for getting less-than-savvy folks to pay scads of money for a CSV file
You're absolutely correct. The list is really not that valuable, but you see where people take that information and run with it putting out hundreds of cheap SEO sites that target mesothelioma. Where I did find value in it, was in categorizing sectors where people pay a log of money for customer lead generation. That's Legal and Financial.
So, I mulled that idea around for a while, and I decided I would try and focus my startup, http://Newsley.com on the Ecnomic and Financial News space. One quarter of all online ad spend is devoted to Financial services marketing. It's a 3.5 Billion a year industry. And, I dont' really see that many financial services ad that much, so they must be paying a lot.
I've been taking Newsley in a different direction now that I'm part way into the business, I'm talking to a lot of people that manage large sums of money for a living, and I'm picking their brains about their news finding and filtering problems. It's been really valuable. My current business has really nothing to with the original list, but it at least pointed me in a certain direction, and I'm quite happy I did it.
That said, the existence of lists like this always makes me shoot a baleful glare in the general direction of Google's "transparency." They are very happy to give away all the rest of the world's information, but anything Big G thinks is commercially sensitive for Google is guarded like Fort Knox. (Did you know AdSense users can't even tell you the CPC rates they get without violating the TOS?)