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Demystifying The Radically Different Keyword Results Provided By Overture and Wordtracker, Part 2 by: Robin Nobles ...because your online success depends on getting accurate keyword counts! (Continued from Part 1. Contact Robin@SearchEngineWorkshops.com for the 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 the 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 the 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 the SPONSORED MATCHES supplied by Overture's pay-per-click engine. Although it is next to impossible to know the 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 the 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 the selected search term. In comparison, if Overture (like Google, for instance) counted only the 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 the myriad artificial duplicate searches conducted by the various softwares (explained above), severely pumps up the number of queries for virtually every legitimate search term imaginable. Reason #3 - Plurals and Singulars Remember our STST example (above) regarding the '180
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