gmoney - 1:59 pm on May 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the information biggles. That 6 month accumulation of keywords could come in handy at times as I often want to get keyword search frequency data for some cyclical keywords and I often miss the event with Wordtracker’s 2 month accumulation of keywords and Overture’s 1 month accumulation of keywords (i.e. Say today I decide to go after next years Academy Awards which I believe happens yearly in March).

When you talked to WebCEO did they mention roughly how many keywords were in their six month database?

I suspect most users of Meta search engines are comparatively unsophisticated web users. If that's the case, then simply extrapolating this sample set to predit total daily searches across all searche engines is flawed to some extent.

I agree, but for politically correct purposes, I tend to call an “unsophisticated web user” a slightly more flattering “less technical user”.:)

I also agree that extrapolating from Meta search engines to other search engines does have flaws. Perhaps the results for widget related keywords are skewed higher or lower. However, I tend to believe that the relative search frequency between the widget related keywords is more immune to extrapolation flaws. For example, the estimated searches for “blue widget” and “red widget” from Wordtracker may be too low in both cases but the ratio of estimated searches between “blue widget” and “red widget” may be quite accurate and may help you decide which of the two keywords offers the most promise. Therefore the flaw with extrapolating may cause you to over predict or under predict the amount of traffic you can generate from your niche but using Meta search engine statistics may still be an effective means to determine which of the keywords you should target within your niche.