I am looking for a tool which will allow me to monitor how a bunch of my pages rank in the results at various search engines when the engines are queried with any of the phrases from a given list.

I'd be astounded if such a tool didn't exist but I looked around some and couldn't find one, at least not as Free Software.

What I would like to ultimately do is have a graph that's updated once a week or so with lines for each of the search queries that go up and down on the graph as a page moves back and forth in the rankings. If I can log the rankings to a text file I could make the graph with one of the available data analysis tools.

You could get the ranking either by scraping the HTML output by a search engine or by using Google's API. So if I just monitored Google it should be pretty easy to do this.

In fact the basic components are readily available as you can see if you search Freshmeat for "google", for example the AltaVista and Google Web Parser System which will put the results of a search into an associative array.

If there isn't such a tool I will write one myself but I thought I should ask around first. Either post a response in your diary or tell me at crawford@goingware.com and I'll say what I find in a future diary entry.

Thanks.