Syntryx has developed a specialized search engine that crawls over 20 million sites and indexes some 1.5 million online affiliate and publisher sites across many ad networks, according to Internet Retailer.

The results enable Syntryx to provide data to advertisers about which sites rank high on traffic from particular keywords.

For example, in one study Syntryx used the terms “Christmas, xmas and holiday” in conjunction with popular electronics-related terms “DVD, digital camera, camcorders, HD and computers” and mapped those terms against the publisher and affiliate sites where eBay, online retailer Buy.com and the web arm of multi-channel retailer BestBuy.com place ads. The resulting scatter diagram shows considerable overlap between Buy.com and eBay, but that BestBuy.com is not advertising on at least 350 relevant sites.

This sort of intelligence could be huge for affiliate managers. I wish I had access to this information back when I was managing affiliate programs.

More details at http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=27514.