Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Isn't Gone, Just Useless
A reader left me a comment (thanks, Ted!) correcting my earlier report about the death of the Overture keyword suggestion tool. Apparently it's not gone, just really really really slow. According to a Yahoo spokesperson:
I wanted to confirm that YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.
See WebmasterWorld for more info. Apparently a new tool (paid, presumably) is in the works.
I guess my prescience wasn't straight on… however, with everyone and their dog beating on the tool to mine for keyword data it's no surprise that it's slowed down so much to be basically unusable. Time to find alternate data sources, at least until the new tool is available. Too bad Google doesn't put out a similar tool — I bet SEO types would happily pay for it.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.