malcolm coles

So I've been using the google keyword tool. It used to show you relative weightings of search terms - you could see that people searched for 'tyres' twice as much as they did for 'car tyres', that sort of thing. 

Recently, Google added exact numbers - showing exactly how many people searched for each term (3,350,000 a month for tyres, 1,500,000 a month for car tyres as you ask.)

How exact is 'exact'?

Anyway, I downloaded some of the data. And I pretty soon noticed that the approximate search volumes are always certain fixed numbers, no doubt carefully chosen to look random. For instance, the following always turn up: 49500, 33100, 22200, 18100, 14800, 12100, 9900, 8100, 6600.

Have you had any numbers near those ones that aren't these ones? It's no surprise that Google rounds the numbers up  to the nearest hundred or thousand. But why then try to hide that by rounding anything near 10,000 to 9,900? Or anything near 18,000 to 18,100?

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