1. Having just downloaded and tested the toolbar on the strength of this article it is, as expected the very useful product one comes to expect from Google.

However, having just spent the past hour testing it out I would question how Google is ranking the suggested keywords. A case of deja vu maybe questioning how Google ranks things!

But, for example, if one types in 'business' then Google displays the various alternatives together with their relevent number of results which, takes me off on a slight tangent;

The number of results that Google displays against each of the keywords suggested within the toolbar does not match up with a search when you hit the return key. Here are some examples:

The Google Suggestion tool for 'business'comes up with the following keywords in order tgether with the following number of results:

business cards - 30,100,000
business - 706,000,000
business plan - 51,200,000

Compare this if you hit the return key on each of these keyword searches you get the following results actually displayed on Google's results page:

business cards - 174,000,000
business - 2,020,000,000
business plan - 418,000,000

I then tried the same thing in Google.co.uk just in case Google was trying to be smart and work things out by country location but, I got the following:

business cards - 11,600,000
business - 211,000,000
business plan - 25,500,000

No match there either - can anyone explain this?

Now, back to my original point; first on the list against a search for business is 'business cards' yet if I check this against other search suggestion tools then I get a completely different set of keywords. For examample a bit of research via Overture suggests the following keywords have the highest demand globally:

business and economy
business
business services
home based business

and in the UK:

business property
business
business opportunity
business loan

Now I know that Google and Overture/Yahoo atrract a different user which, is often more prominent on technical subjects but, it seems strange to me that the highest demand searches showing up via Overture on a fairly generic term do not even appear on Google's suggested list. That goes against my experience of client PPC campaigns where traffic and click through can vary wildly but users generally search for the same thing in all engines on relatively non-specialised subjects.

Is Google attempting to suggest keywords based on where it would like to take us rather than its experience of what we are looking for.

Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Carl Spencer