Yigber’s Online Adventures

A friend has recently brought to my attention this free tool: checktraffic.cgi by seotoolset.com.

This script measures the search volume for a specified keyword per day for each of the 3 major engines: Google, Yahoo, Live.  The measurement is in “exact” numbers.  Here’s what it gives for the keyword: “testing”:

How does it do that ?

There are some tools that measure similar things but their granularity is much more coarse.  Google’s Keyword Tool gives a measure of the volume per month and on a scale from 0-5. Yahoo’s overture tool gives numbers for a single specific month of the year.  Compete.com, comScore, HitWise and such estimate the traffic based on a large user panel (several million users), or take their data from ISP logs.

Note that if you run several queries you can see that the Google’s volume share is a constant 57.83% which is a textbook number for Google’s search share.  Hmmm…  This means that this tool either obtains and estimate of the overall search volume for the 3 and divides accordingly, or obtains an estimate for any single on the engines and extrapolates accordingly.

Here are the pies that show the seotraffic.cgi results for two queries: “testing” and “games”.  Look similar ?

Also note that the results from checktraffic.cgi does not change from one day to another !

There are several ways I can think of, that this can be done:

1. Dogpile: dogpile.com the meta-search engine has a search spy applet that reveals a sample of the search queries it sees.  Possibly, this tool milks and accumulates the spy’s output.  Now you need several keywords for which Google published the exact volume and by comparing that volume to the one found on dogpile, an estimate can be given for any keyword based on the volume in dogpile.  Then extrapolate to the other 2 engines.

2. Yahoo overture: overture is Yahoo’s  keyword suggest tool that includes search volume numbers for January 2007 (if you use this one).  It would be simple enough to take this number and divide it by 31.  Problem is that I checked it and the numbers don’t fit ?!

3. Same as number 2, but using the subscription based web-tracking systems, instead of the free overture tool.

I wonder which of those is true.

In any case, the checktraffic script is a highly inaccurate and can be misleading. Use it with care.