What percentage of the total does Overture represent?

[dsiomtw]

What is the general concensus regarding how an Overture number compares to a total or global number? For example, say you lookup "whatever" or "whatever.com" for that matter. If Overture says 50 searches, you know that is only a portion of the total. Surely it has to be at least 2-3 times what the Overture number is, right?

 

[cera]

Not sure, but my guess would be that Overture reports searches made through the Yahoo owned group of engines including Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AllTheWeb and Overture.

Last figure I heard was that Yahoo had about 30% of the search engine traffic and I would think that the rest of the group must have at least 5%
That would make Overture reported searches a little over 1/3 of all searches.

Problem with Overture numbers is that Overture doesn't differentiate between singular/plural of a search term or order of terms in a keyword phrase e.g. "real estate" and "estate real" show same number of searches.

IEBA.net / TISBO.com / KidsClothes.us

 

[EbookLover]

OVT is not very reliable for keyword info. Actually, although they are supposed to represent about 30% of internet searches, I have found that their #s are WAY higher than what you would find at Wordtracker. I trust wordtracker over OVT, but it does cost money. WordTracker has spam filters intact, OVT does not. You see, spammers are sending queries to SEs in an attempt to confuse the SEs into thinking folks are searching on popular terms and then clicking on a certain domain the spammer owns. This is an underhanded attempt to gain SE rankings. Google and others have not put in systems to counteract this spamming yet. Bottom line is that Wordtracker has filters in place to weed out these queries, OVT does not. Therefore, OVT results reflect all the searches, even the bogus spam queries.