To space or not to space in Japanese

Overture tool suggests no difference

[whats up skip]

Using the Overture tool it suggests that there is no difference between key phrases in Japanese with or without a space between the words.

In Google or Yahoo (Japan) you do receive different results. In the case of Yahoo the results are very different. Only when there is a space between the words do the Yahoo directory results show up.

The Google keyword suggestion tool only suggests using a space between the words.

The question is; does anyone have some statistics on the differences in search frequency between to the two types?

[bill]

You have to enter a space on Japanese engines between keywords if you want decent results. Any Japanese searcher will tell you this. Searching without a space between keywords will generally return a very limited set of results. Unless you're optomizing for a certain phrase a space is recommended.

Overture's Match Driver will do strange things with your keywords anyway, so it may not matter wheter there's a space for them.

I'm not clear what you're asking for here...is this for PPC or general SERPs? David_M reported a little while back that spaces in keyword phrases were helping bold terms in AdWords...

[whats up skip]

It would appear that in Google Adwords you really need to have a space between the words in a key phrase.

I think we need to put the space in because of the limitation of the search engine algo as normal Japanese text does not have a space between words.