Velocityscape launched Googspy.com in April of 2005 as an experiment focused on answering the question "What ads to my competitors buy on Google?". In a matter of hours, news of Googspy was spreading like wildfire across the Search blogs and forums. Within a few days Googspy was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal! Clearly, there was a tremendous demand for online competitive intelligence. We received feedback from all kinds of marketing professionals and biggest want was more raw data and keyword statistics.

We started building a full fledged product offering to meet these requirements and it became apparent that the Googspy name no longer fit. The product had become much more than a Google Adwords competitive intelligence tool. Soon, in fact, we would like to expand it to cover other search engines. It needed a name that could stand on its own - SpyFu.com.

We chose the name because, among the other possibilities, it sounded the coolest. We liked the idea of becoming a SpyFu Master, and all the other cheesy, but entertaining things we could do with the name. While we thought we might have invented the term, Spy-Fu has been used many times online to describe the super-human fighting techniques of everyone from Spy vs. Spy to 007. Spy-Fu has also been used as slang to refer to one’s in-depth knowledge of intelligence. So, in addition to sounding cool, the name tells a story about what we do. We are very happy with the new name.