I've just been looking at Microsoft's adCenter Labs demo page, which contains some tools which may be of use to people in the niche marketing game.

Keyword Mutation

Enter a keyword, and the tool will show you common mis-spellings or "alternative representations" of that word from MSN's search logs. For example, "britney spears" will give you:

britneyspears
britny spears
brittney spears
britney spear
britany spears
briteny spears

http://adlab.msn.com/keyMut/default.aspx

Keyword Group Detection

Similar to Google Sets, input a keyword and the tool will find a list of similar/related keywords for you. This example is for the query "mouse"

mice
mouse drivers
mouse driver
optical mouse
trackball
keyboard
wireless mouse
wireless keyboard
usb mouse
intellimouse
mouse optical
computer mouse
logitech
wheel mouse
desktop
cordless mouse
cursor
touchpad

http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/default.aspx

Search Funnels

This tool will show you which other searches users will try after searching for something. For example, after searching for "firefox"

• 5.7% of users will then search for "mozilla"
• 4.33% of users will then search for "mozillafirefox"
• 2.7% of users will then search for "firefox download"
• etc

It also works the other way around!

Before searching for "firefox":

• 6.31% of users will search for "foxfire"
• 4.44% will search for "mozilla"
• 2.48% will search for "firfox"

I think the potential uses of this tool speak for themselves!

http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/

Demographics Prediction

Attempts to predict information about any given website (or search term)'s users. Interesting idea, not the most accurate thing in the world, though.

For the record, it tells me that this blog's readership 61% male, 39% female and mainly between the ages of 35 and 49.

These tools and more can be found at http://adlab.msn.com/demo.aspx. There are several others marked as "coming soon", so keep an eye on that page!