Farewell to Yahoo!'s Overture keyword suggestion tool (the burial and a rant)
Welcome to another late-breaking edition of The Keyword Informer.
I’m glad you could attend this long awaited funeral of sorts (it’s been long overdue).
What’s going on?
It was just over a year ago that the Overture keyword suggestion tool was showing signs of trouble when it disappeared for approximately four days. Just when everyone thought it was gone, Yahoo! representatives suddenly appeared in the forums and announced that the tool would remain available, but no longer maintained.
Apparently, Yahoo! decided to continue extending the life of this tool that has been battered and beaten up by hundreds of sites and desktop software tools that pilfer the currently stale data (I’ll explain that in a minute).
Sure – NicheBOT also gave results from the Overture tool at the request of its members that wanted it and I’m very much about “give the people what they want.” 
There have been recent signs that the server (computer) where the Overture tool is located has been struggling and to tool barely loads at all – let alone gives any results. From recent sightings, desktop keyword tools and sites using the Overture database have been literally forced to switch to other keyword sources. So…
Somebody has to give the Yahoo! Overture keyword suggestion tool a proper burial and NicheBOT is willing to step forward to do it and save any honor that may be left for this highly neglected data source.
As of
But let’s forget about that for a minute.
Today we shall pay tribute to a tool that was the first of its kind (and best of all, free) since back in the late 1990’s given the fact that it is now extremely outdated and, as mentioned, heavily neglected.
If you ever made it to the “inventory.overture.com” URL where the actual tool is located, the search counts for the tool have not been updated since January 2007.
As I’ve consistently held in my explanation about where the different keyword data comes from, the Overture tool is a great idea generator and keyword generator – and that’s about it. So for that purpose, I guess it doesn’t really matter whether the search count has been outdated a year or even three years. 
It should never be taken serious or counted as accurate for the search count.
When you take into consideration my most recent article entitled 5 Free Powerful Ways to Conduct Online Market Research that has nothing to do with Keyword Research, current keyword databases should be heavily relied upon as accurate for search counts. (I explain why in the market research article above.) If any one keyword source can be relied upon to tell the tale of search volume for a particular keyword phrase, that would be the largest database on the planet – Google.
If you weren’t aware, the more important flaws to understand about the Overture tool were that (1) it combined search counts for the plural and singular of each keyword phrase, thus leaving us no way to distinguish which word was more popular, and (2) the search counts were highly inflated and affected by automated bid management tools that used to check bid positions back before Overture’s Pay-Per-Click engine was transitioned over to YSM or Yahoo Search Marketing.
All these apparent flaws with the Overture tool didn’t stop the self-proclaimed gurus from recommending this tool in their informational products as a great market research tool. And as recent as late 2007, the tool was mentioned and relied upon in a mutli-thousand dollar per person workshop.
The standard discussion the gurus would normally spew about the Overture tool was as long as you discovered a search count of 10,000 from a certain keyword phrase or topic, you’ve got a ripe niche market for the picking (as if this was some magic number for EVERY niche market).
This kind of trash talk makes me livid when people spend their hard earned money only to be misled!
As discussed in my Market Research article (above), keyword research only shows what people search for, not what people buy and should not even be considered as a measure for finding profitable niche.
If you read my recent article about how to conduct proper market research, one of my trusted friends tells you straight out that keyword research is not a science, nor can it be at this current time. I also share in a direct forthright manner how exactly to conduct market research. (And it won’t cost you a dime.)
Every tool has its purpose – but when gurus (even self-proclaimed ones) just start dispensing and recommending ill-fated courses of action, it makes me sick, especially when people are paying for the information.
So what about those die hards that still won’t give up on the Overture tool – no matter what?
We’ve archived the tool just for those people that just don’t want to let the data source go.
One such NicheBOT user Rika says:
“I was very upset to hear that you are going to remove Overture entirely. For me that is really bad news. Although there are hiccups, I have still been able to use it. Often you only have to click the search button a second time to get perfect, usable results. This morning it is working fine. I still prefer it over Wordtracker. I have had very good results with Overture. Please, can’t you keep it up for those of us who still want to make use of it when possible?
Thanks
Rika”
For Rika and those die hards, we have kept the Yahoo! Overture (Not WordTracker or Keyword Discovery) keyword suggestion tool where it has always been in remembrance of a data source that was great when it first broke onto the scene back in the late 1990’s – but may it rest in peace!
Thank you for attending this burial of the Overture keyword suggestion tool and please leave your thoughts and sentiments below.
Best of success,
Jim Morris, Founder
NicheBOT – Finds exactly what people search for