Importance of Relevant Search Results in Google and Bing

Relevant search results are the results given back within a search engine for a specific keyword or keyphrase that a searcher would look for.  They are a representation of how many pages (not websites) on the web are considered related by that specific search.  These results have many uses, which include helping a business understand if a certain keyword or keyphrase would be worth spending budget on to drive qualified visitors.

An example of a relevant search result would be searching for the word “movies”, compared to “comedy movies”.  Search for both of these on Google, here are the results that are returned:

You can see in both of these shots, that the relevant search results are 3.6 billion and 449 million respectively.  Obviously, it makes sense that something as generic as “movies” would have a lot more relevant results than “comedy movies”, but we can take this a step further.

Let’s look at “Will Ferrell movies for sale in Cleveland Ohio” and compare it to “Will Ferrell movies for sale in Akron Ohio”:

If I was a retailer that focused on selling movies in Ohio, I can then compare competition between these major cities, or find more niche words that do not have as many competitors.
Additionally, every search engine would give back a different number of relevant search results based on their algorithm and how they qualify content as “relevant”.  For the keywords we researched above, here are the results returned by Bing: