(
Your terms - "exercise muscle","muscle exercise" - do not have enough search volume to show graphs. ...were you getting that result the other day?)
The results of
exercise muscle (unquoted) will NOT equal
"exercise muscle"+"muscle exercise" (both quoted), because the unquoted search also counts other queries which don't turn up in the quoted ones.
If the logic of that isn't clear, here's an example. Let's say we ran google trends on 5 searches, each run once:
- exercise muscle to make me buff
- muscle exercise routine
- how do I exercise my bicep muscles
- build muscle with exercise
- womens' exercise routines to avoid building muscle
"exercise muscle" (quoted) has a frequency of 1 (#1)
"muscle exercise" (quoted) has a frequency of 1 (#2)
exercise muscle has a frequency of 5 (all 1-5 have exercise muscle).
1+1 does not equal 5.
So, prove this and that it
can all add up, take a look at
this trends search - this is a good example for a few reasons, but I'll not get into that. First, ignore the line graph: it's too complex to consider for these purposes. Instead, look at the bar graphs below it, which break searches down by location. In many of them, if you added the second and third terms (i.e. red + orange) are nearly equal to the first (blue) term, especially outside the US.
Quote:
Originally Posted by minim
They should be equal, shouldn't they?
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No, because people are NOT using the exact phrase,
"exercise muscle", very much . When I was writing the above example queries, it was VERY DIFFICULT to work out a plausible search query using EXACTLY (i.e. that would turn up in quotes) that phrase. Searchers
are using
exercise and
muscle together in a single search, but not exactly one after the other, which is why it doesn't turn up in
"exercise muscle".
Sigh. Can't believe I just went through all that. Does it answer your question?