Saturday, January 19, 2013

Genealogy losing popularity?

Wikipedia tells me that "Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from 2004), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches, globally.[1]"

On a whim this morning I put the search term "genealogy" into Google trends to see how popular the term is in relation to other search terms. And what did I find?  It appears that since 2004 the term "genealogy" has lost popularity in relation to other search terms on Google.  Now I don't think that the pursuit of genealogy is declining; my theory is that people searching for "genealogy" were probably early adopters of the Google search engine.

What do you think?

Google Trends results for search "genealogy"

The Google Trends results page also gives a "Regional interest" map that indicates the areas where searches for the term "genealogy" have been most popular. There are no surprises here as the popularity of the term appears to be strongest in areas where English is the main language.

Regional interest map for term "genealogy"

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Very interesting Jill. Same for Family History search terms: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=family%20history

Alex said...

One word search(es) relating to genealogy may be declining, but the pursuit of family tree information would surely be increasing. It is likely the various terms to search, from family tree, genealogy, family history, where did i come from, and specific name searches added all together is still VERY large.

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