see a number next to my search term at the top of the graph. What does this mean?

11. I see a number next to my search term at the top of the graph. What does this mean?

The number you see next to your search term corresponds to its total average traffic in the time frame you’ve chosen.
When comparing multiple search terms on a relative scale, the first term you enter will always be 1.0, as subsequent terms are ranked and scaled against this term. For example, you may see: blogs (1.0) and newspapers (0.51). In this case, newspapers has approximately half the searches of blogs.
If you export the data to a .csv file and you’ve selected fixed scaling, 1.0 corresponds to the average traffic for the search term in fixed point of time (usually January 2004), and all numbers are relative to this point. If you chose a time frame of 2007, the number you see for blogs (for example, 5.82) would mean that blogs has had approximately 5.8 times more relative traffic in 2007 than it had in January 2004. Similarly, the the number you see for newspapers (2.05) means that newspapers has about 2 times more traffic in 2007 than blogs had in 2004.
Note that the ratio between these numbers always remains constant and corresponds to how the keywords compare to each other; only the scaling basis (or the meaning of 1.0) changes.
Learn more about scaling.