[bluekeybox]

Point #1 annoys me a lot. It would be possible to perform many interesting analyses on your own (think Venn diagrams, association graphs on natural language) if the numbers were accurate. But they are not.

I actually heard first-hand from a Google employee an explanation for why these numbers are like that. She said something like, "they are only estimates." Well the point is, if these estimates are as inaccurate as they are, why put them up at all? Doing so is almost dishonest-like.

I almost have a feeling (warning: getting into conspiracy territory here) that the search recall numbers are inaccurate on purpose, so that no third-party analytics could be built using them.