Google's traffic estimate numbers off?

[Makaveli2007]

I've been wondering: What are your experiences with Google's new feature of showing estimates for search volumes? I know with overture they used to be way off normally, because they had to extrapolate the data and didn't mind counting searches twice, etc....and wordtracker was said to have cleaner data, but they had to extrapolate it from a sample size which is like <1% of the whole search market (and with a different searcher profile)....keyword discovery didnt seem to be the real deal, either...

but how about Google now actually showing numbers? They own most of the search market so they dont have to do much guesstimating.

Are their search volume estimates somewhat accurate? Say the real search volumes being somewhere in a range of 50% to 150% of what those estimates show?

Or are they mostly WAY off, too (and thus hardly more useful than the green bars they used to show for search volume estimates)?

thanks!

[centime]

in my limited experience, based on a few rankings i've compared, they are spot on,

That is accurate

[Makaveli2007]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

[Robert Charlton]

I had seen a big glitch that now appears to have been fixed. Google was dropping some major phrases entirely. I'm happy to say that all appears to be working well now. Discussed in these two threads...

Google is now showing numbers in its keyword tool
[webmasterworld.com...]

Insufficient Data in all searches today?
Is keyword suggestion tool in adwords working?
[webmasterworld.com...]

The tool defaults to Broadmatch, so you do have to be careful to reset the tool to "Exact" each time you make a new query.