1. != means "does not equal" in programming talk.

2. I caught this too but if you look, the scale used is actually PIXELS so that would make this graph logarithmic. That's darn misleading in a bar chart.

3. Seems the two conclusions are that the "statisticians" who created this were sloppy (happens all the time) OR it's intentionally misleading. OR a combination of same. The other option is that web developers aren't necessarily statisticians and they might have interpreted the data...variously.