Fun with the Google External Keyword Tool
Google announced a major upgrade to the Google (External) Keyword Tool — it now gives actual numbers of searches, instead of vague logarithmic green bars. This now makes it very cool for figuring out what people actually search for. Estimated average monthly search volumes include:
- George Bush 1,830,000
- White House 1,220,000
- George Bush sucks 1,300
- Hillary Clinton sucks 1,600
- Bill Clinton sucks 140
- Ron Paul sucks 1,000
- Microsoft sucks 2,900
- White House black market 135,000
- Hotel 185,000,000
- Britney Spears 6,120,000
- Brittney Spears 368,000
- Britney Spears naked 165,000
- Hillary Clinton naked 2,400
- Search 45,500,000
- Search engine 2,240,000
- Search engine placement 60,000
- Enterprise search 12,100
- Attivio 390
- Text mining 9,900
- Attensity 1,000
- Foobar 65,500
- asdf 110,000
- Free ringtones 4,090,000
- Free pizza 40,500
And that’s as far as I got before getting the message
We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it. Please note that using your browser’s back button in AdWords can increase the likelihood of errors. If you think this was the cause of your error, please try again without using the back button.
A few notes on using the Google External Keyword Tool:
- Like many Google offerings, it’s down a lot.
- It hasn’t worked for weeks in my Firefox 2, except when I switch the rendering engine to IE emulation via the indispensable IE Tab plug-in.
- When I copied a results screen and pasted it into an OpenOffice document, I saw actual dollar amounts. These surely were bid amounts associated with advertising for those particular keywords.
- Keyword listings like this always have anomalies, as can be seen by oddly high numbers for weird word combinations. Notwithstanding the figures above, I don’t really think 135,000 searches per month are done on white house black market, any more than I believe Google Analytics when it tells me I got 19 different visitors to DBMS2 last month via the search phrase abadi column-store compression.
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I’m fairly certain the error message is googles way of saying “you’ve searched too many terms in too short a time, so now you’re cut off” as it has happened to me three times today from two different IPs while mining a list of over 100 keywords