question about keyword matching

[josh]

Sydney or Jeremy,

I am confused by keyword matching, in particular phrase and exact match. For example, when I use the adwords keyword tool and do an exact match search, the number of searches is much lower than it is with the phrase match, which is to be expected, since exact match only includes that exact keyword.

In Google's explanation, phrase match is where you can appear for that term plus another word before or after it. For example, if I were targeting the term "home business" I would be eligible to appear when the term "make money home business" or "home business ideas" came up.

However, with exact match, I would only show up when somebody types in "home business" and nothing else.

However, when I do a search with brackets, which supposedly means exact match, I get 445,000,000 results, and since it always bolds the keywords in the search results, the terms home and business are often bolded separately, meaning it is counting every website that has the term "home" and the term "business" apart from each other.

This is obviously the reason I'm getting so many results. The vast majority of these sites probably have nothing to do with the home business field.

However, when I do a search in quotes, which is supposed to be phrase match and more lenient, I get just 27,000,000 results, and the only terms bolded are the exact phrase "home business" and nothing else.

Why does searching for something in phrase match mode, with quotes, appear to give more targeted data than exact match? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Hopefully this question is clear, and if not, I'd be happy to clarify further. Thanks a lot.

[Techie]

You should keep in mind exact, board, phrase matches are more for Adwords control. When running a general search exact and board are basically the same as Google is matching (to use your example) home business along with home or business. This is why you see home business AND home AND business all bold in the SERPs. However when a user runs a search using exact or board the displayed Adwords may change based on the bidding setup.