Demystifying The Radically Different Keyword Results Provided By Overture and Wordtracker ...because your online success depends on getting accurate keyword counts! Part 2- by Robin Nobles
(Continued from Part 1. Contact Robin@SearchEngineWorkshops.com for
complete article.)
Reason #2 - Duplicate Searches
As you most certainly must know, Overture's strength as a viable advertising medium for online businesses lies in fact they are provide results to "tens of thousands of Web sites" which include AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN Search, HotBot, and AllTheWeb just to name a few. They claim to reach more than 80% of active U.S. Internet users.
Potentially, this is great for advertisers! ...yet this very same structure is what so greatly contributes to artificial skew leading to extremely over-inflated reporting of keyword queries.
According to Overture itself, statistics on searches in any previous month are compiled from Overture's partner search engines. To further understand how partnering tends to facilitate skewed query counts, let's examine what happens when a visitor conducts a search at AltaVista.
What's actually happening is that two searches are being conducted at one time - one at AltaVista, and another that lists SPONSORED MATCHES supplied by Overture's pay-per-click engine.
Although it is next to impossible to know exact figures, suffice it to say that a single human often generates multiple queries when doing a single search as calculated by Overture's STST. In some cases that same human could even generate additional "hits" for a given keyword simply by conducting same search again on a different engine if such engine is also an Overture partner.
For instance, searching Yahoo, then searching again on MSN, then searching again on AltaVista, then again on AllTheWeb.com would tally at least five "hits" for selected search term. In comparison, if Overture (like Google, for instance) counted only searches that were done "on-site," such duplicate searches would not be counted and their search query numbers would be far more accurate.
This scenario, combined with myriad artificial duplicate searches conducted by various softwares (explained above), severely pumps up number of queries for virtually every legitimate search term imaginable.
Reason #3 - Plurals and Singulars
Remember our STST example (above) regarding 180,468 "searches" for term "keyword"? Well, another factor to consider is that Overture's STST combines both plural term (keywords) and singular (keyword) in compiling that number.
And, Overture's STST not only combines plural and singular versions of "keywords," they also combine upper and lower case searches as well. Obviously, these two factors also exert an upward effect on query count tabulations.
Third: Examining The Alternatives.
So now obvious question - Is there a "better" way to tabulate search term query counts? ...let's examine alternatives.
Meta-engines - a better way to accurately tabulate queries.
Obviously we'd like to eliminate artificial and duplicate searches from our tabulations, and fortunately there is a way to do so. The solution is Meta-engines.
Composite (Meta) engines, like Metacrawler and Dogpile, are search engines that query all major engines simultaneously. One of key differences is that ratio of human queries to automated queries for a meta-engine is much higher than for a major search engine. That's because it doesn't make sense for anyone to point their auto-bots at meta-engines.
