[Question] Dilemma With Google

Okay, I can't get figure this out... Just look at the image below:



The kw is how to train a dog to sit and when I enter this kw in google with quotes I get over 1.6 million results. But when I go to the last result page it shows only 176 results.

So which is it? 1.6 million or 176?

You guys have any idea? Which one are more reliable?

Thanks

Both...

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 176 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Using "how to make a dog sit" give you pages with that exact phase (176) without duplication of websites, junk or websites that Goggle feels aren?t relevant to your search, if you look at the omitted results, they are from the same websites over and over again up to 1000 results.

Somewhere between 1000 and 1.6 million ?how to make a dog sit? will start dropping off to a variants such as, ?make dog sit?, ?dog sit how to?, ?sit dog? or some guys article that he spun 1 million times with "how to make a dog sit?.

Goggle has said that they believe their search engine is so efficient that very few people actually need to see the results above 1000 so therefore they are not displayed. Most people find what they need in the first 3 pages of any search or re-search with new keywords.

So does this mean this particular kw is easy to rank for when only 176 results are NOT omitted?

Google isn't what it used to be a few months back when there are hundreds of kw with less than 10k competition in quotes. Did they changed their system or something to make it harder for us to find decent kw?

I think just the opposite. They have only found 176 sites that they think are worth ranking out of the 1.6 million that have that keyword.

The squidoo, hubpages, articlebase, helium, and such sites with that keyword are there because they are all mostly web 2.0 or trusted by Google. Any other .coms on there with that keyword probably have some very good SEO, backlinks and the other 200+ things Google bots look for in a website.

Ranking for that keyword would be difficult but not undoable with some hard work I'm sure.

FYI - it is not the KW I'm targeting - I'm smarter than that... It was just an example...

Another question, most marketers use less than 10K of competition under quotes in google, but since there has been a change in google's calculation, what is a good barometer to find out the competition level?