Overture Keyword selector - what does the figure mean?

[Macbeth]

Say i type in widgets. It will say 25,000 searches have been made in december 2004 for widgets.

Does this mean in all search engines (including Google) or just Yahoo and MSN?

[thedeveloper]

Just Yahoo and MSN search. In other words, the search engines that are powered by Overture.

[fischermx]

I can't believe I just exactly asked this two minutes ago, sorry.

Actually it is Yahoo, Lycos, MSN, InfoSpace, CNet, AltaVista.

But the thing is to try to guess the total searches for a given keyword, including all, that's the bottom question.

[ogletree]

It also counts widgets, widget, widgeting, widget surfing in new mexico. So it is very hard to tell with that number. Overture and word tracker numbers should not be taken as gospel. There is no way to know for sure. They are good at comparing them to each other in the same system. Like if you have one that is 25K and one that is 250 you know that the 2nd term is not as populer as the first. Even then you can't be for sure. I ignore the numbers.

[markd]

Do these figures incorporate 'organic' searches for a given query or are they exclusively searches which resulted in somebody clicking an Overture PFC ad?