Newbie here,
I tried to find if this topic has been discussed previously but I did not see it.

I am trying to complete the settings properly for COMPETITION so KEI will be calculated properly.

For example, I search for something popular like diet plans, G tells me that there are 164,000,000 results. When i run KEI, under competition for the same keyword I get 880,000. Obviously very different and the KEI calculation will obviously be wrong. I played around with other advance operator settings and I am also way off.

I am only interested in local searches (US). The number of searches match correctly. The issue is the competition number.

I have checked off
Collect competition every time you update KEI

and use advance operator
keyword

when rank tracker comes back with the result of competition is, it is very different, way different than the number I get when I go to G and search for that same term myself.

What am I doing wrong? What do I need to adjust?