Perish the thought – If you are a marketer then Google shows you the amount of ads you are competing with, which is useful information. However check this out:-

Input a keyword phrase in inverted commas, for this example “guitar courses”

Now go to the bottom of the page – click on the last page

Er – what’s happened here? Looks like we only have 696 competitors to worry about not 44,000

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see there were in fact only 8 pages and not 10!!

A mystery indeed – and no I don’t have an explanation as yet, but watch this space