The valuations imply that while table.com is not worth a huge amount to me, it is worth a lot of money to a certain special someone out there.  But, who is that right somebody?

One way to get some insight into the world's collective unconscious is to look at the results of Overture's Keyword Selector Tool.  While Yahoo gets considerably less traffic than Google, Yahoo does one thing which is very nice.  It provides a quantitative list of recent searches that include a specified term -- and best of all -- how often someone searched on that phrase!  So, in addition to knowing which searches are the most frequent, it tells you how many people did that search on Yahoo. 

With a bit of simple math, and knowledge of the the relative search engine market shares, you can tease out of this data how many searches like this probably happened elsewhere (including Google, Microsoft and Ask).  Assuming that people generally search for the same things on Yahoo as on Google (They don't, exactly, but it probably suffices for an approximation.), and and combining your numbers with how the search engine market is divided amongst the various engines, you can estimate the likely search numbers for each engine, and for the search market in total.

I typed table into the box, and reviewed the top 100 results.   The top 10 were table (110,988), periodic table (102,570), pool table (94,340), coffee table (49,307), contact myspace table (45,558), poker table (44,113), periodic table of elements (38,289), multiplication table (29,531), table lamp (29,314), and table saw (28,568).

There's a bit of a long tail.  The top 10 searches happened a lot... over 570,000 times, but the top 100 searches occured even more often -- nearly 1.5 million searches.  Entry #100 -- poker table top -- still was getting over 4,000 searches/month, according to Overture.  Assuming that Yahoo has about 20% of the search market these days (Google has ~60%), that implies that 20,000 searches are happening every month for #100 alone!

To better interpret the data, I tried to categorize each of the keyword phrases.  How did it break down?  Several of the top phrases (7 in the top 100) were references to the periodic table (probably not very monetizable), and there were almost as many to tax tables (maybe a little better).  But nearly 60 of the searches had to do with furniture and/or games, which sounds good.  Furniture is a sizable industry that deals with lots of consumers, where a branded URL might be valuable.

So, if I had to make a guess about who would find the most value in owning table.com, I would probably choose someone in the furniture industry.  Of course, it doesn't mean that these entities will turn out to be most interested, just that it seems like a good fit.  And, I haven't yet addressed the question of how one might go about reaching out to these potential buyers...