What search engine does Wordtracker use? From what I understand it uses a search engine that has about 1% of the searches that Google has. This may be incorrect so please pull me up on it if you know otherwise. I know you can use Google on it but I was just curious why it uses the other one and what it was called? Some of the results are small for long tailed keywords compared to Google which makes it harder to pick keywords on Wordtracker
It does not use any real search engine data, it buys ISP data from NetZero and other smaller ISPs and some additional panel data that is available to anyone then tries to extrapolate it into a real number - sometimes it is close, sometimes way off - use WordTracker for trends, not actual numbers.
Hi there, my name's Mal, and I work with Wordtracker Customer Services. This is a question that comes up fairly regularly, and it's incredible how many misconceptions there are around this. hodbod, the Google data available in Wordtracker is taken from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and is the same data you'd get from there. The difference is that you can manage the keywords from Google far more flexibly in Wordtracker, and for many of the keywords you can get Wordtracker's unique competition data. The 'Wordtracker data' is from our partner search engines in the US, which are metacrawler.com and dogpile.com, and is just under 1% of US search for the last 365 days. The data is updated daily, and when it hits the servers, it's between 16 and 30 hours old. Badlands07 - there's no extrapolation in Wordtracker - the numbers you see are the amount of times each keyword appears in the database, and each keyword is presented exactly as it was typed into one of the engines mentioned above. You do make a good point, though - to use the figures as relative values rather than put too much emphasis on the actual numbers - any experienced SEO will do the same with any keyword research tool, as it can give a much clearer and more balanced view of the whole picture. I hope that's of some help - but if you (or anyone else) have more questions, feel free to write to us at support [at] wordtracker {} com (I can't post links here!) all the best, Mal