Google Lies: Different Keyword Competition Results
I happen to notice something scary yesterday and thought it was worth documenting. If anyone out there has any insight as to what might cause something like this, please share. I’m hoping to get some feedback from Matt Cutts through his blog or the Google Webmaster forum.
When searching from two separate computers on the same network within Google for the keyword phrase "website video sales people" I get completely difference numbers in reference to how many pages Google states are within Google’s index for this particular search phrase.
Google has many datacenters and index numbers will vary as they are estimates, however, seeing a difference of 8 million makes me raise an eyebrow.
Here is the second result:
Notice how for the same search phrase the first shows 8 million and the second shows 16 million? Is Google just giving throwing numbers at us now? As an internet marketing firm and others as well, this number is used to differentiate how competitive each keyword is that we’re targeting.
What could cause this? Both browsers are firefox and there are a few components installed on each but for the most part are the same. Could a browser function cause different data to be pulled? Does this value warrant what Google and others say it is, which represents how many pages within Google index are currently competing for this keyword phrase? Is there a firefox plugin that will show you which datacenter your connected to? This would be the only way to truly measure.
June 14th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Troy, the answer is within your screenshots. One search includes results for all languages. The other for English only. To change that setting, click on “preferences” next to the search button.
September 13th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Its always some little mundane detail! Thanks for pointing that out Mark.
May 5th, 2009 at 11:36 am
It’s a tad more than that… do a search on any topic… note how many “results” Google ‘gives’ you…
Then click on the last page of results (try an exotic search term that doesn’t have too many pages, so you can quickly get to the last page), now examine how many results Google is *NOW* reporting.
The differences can be dramatic, and for people trying to optimize for a particular keyword, it might make the difference between trying for a particular keyword or not.
For example, I just typed in the keyphrase:
red tomato bethesda
Google reports 102,000 results.
But it will only show you 100 pages of results, and changes it’s grand total to just 12,300.
Now I don’t know about you, but 12,300 is, while not exactly a 10th… is close enough to it for argument’s sake. Why is Google reporting initially 10 times more results?
More dramatic examples can be found with a little bit of searching… and interestingly enough, Google appears to learn from it’s mistakes… it apparently starts reporting more accurate results after you’ve done a search.
In other searches, I’ve gone from over 3 million, down to just 335,000… so give it a try… and pay attention, because Google doesn’t always give you accurate numbers until you piddle with them a little…
May 7th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
I thought keyword competition had more to do with the strength of the listings on the first page versus the total number of listings. If the top 10-20 are alot stronger than your page, you won’t rank well regardless if there are 10 listings or 10 million.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
You’re absolutely right Dan. We put more weight in how well the top 10 sites have been optimized than how many index counts. Its a metric however that is available to us though, so might as well use it to some degree. More on this later…
May 29th, 2010 at 4:46 am
i think it’s pretty clear google is not straight with the public on how and why they do things (china, liberal bias, etc.)…but they are the big dog and perhaps not perfect, but where else you gonna go?