I knew Google Trends was “a thing”, but it had fallen off my radar. Until I wondered if Craigslist was going the way of Rich Text Format. That’s when I started playing with the 10 year trend lines.
I began with Craigslist and Wikipedia...
- Craigslist is looking post-peak
- Wikipedia looks ill, but given how embedded it is in iOS I wonder if that’s misleading.
Then I started looking at topics of special relevance to my life or interests. First I created a set of baselines to correct for decliniing interest in web search. I didn’t see any decline
- Cancer: rock steady, slight dip in 2009, slight trend since, may reflect demographics
- Angina: downward trend, but slight. This could reflect lessening interest in search, but it may also reflect recent data on lipid lowering agents and heart disease.
- Exercise: pretty steady
- Uber: just to show what something hot looks like. (Another: Bernie Sanders)
Things look pretty steady over the past 10 years, so I decided I could assume a flat baseline for my favorite topics.That’s when it got fascinating.
- Inline skating (I do this) is dead and so is skateboarding
- Microsoft Excel is stable, but Google Sheets is way way up. Apple Numbers is doing a lot better than I expected.
- Special Needs has a slight downwards trend but Downs Syndrome has plummeted - perhaps due to America's eugenics program. I wonder if the fading of Downs syndrome is responsible for the modest decline in special needs searches.
- Cycling for exercise is somewhat down, with a nice seasonal spike pattern. Mountain biking has declined significantly.
- Cross Country Skiing varies (bet it’s snow depth) but seems constant at a low level
- CrossFit has probably peaked but is still popular.
- AI (artificial intelligence), much to my surprise, is way down.
- Growing use of searches on “Apple Quality” — probably not in a happy way (I’m betting this is Apple corp, not Apple fruit).
- Dementia is a slowly growing concern
- Backpacking is in a gentle decline
- Google seems to have flatlined and even Android is trending down, but Facebook has fallen off a cliff (hard to interpret, it’s so ubiquitous), Apple has slow growth but iPhone is only holding steady. Weirdly, Twitter looks rather like Facebook - not healthy at all.
- RSS. Sob.
- Health Informatics, my professional discipline, has had a big decline since 2004. It feels that way. SNOMED CT is in a lesser decline. On the other hand, family medicine is pretty stable (one weird 2011 peak) even as Geriatrics is in decline (WTF?)
- Carbon tax is off the radar and interest in global warming is way down. Be afraid.
- eBooks are post-peak - a failure to takeoff (I blame the DRM).
Some of these findings line up with my own expectations, but there were quite a few surprises. It’s illuminating to compare Excel to Google Sheets. The Downs Syndrome collapse is a marker for a dramatic social change — the world’s biggest eugenics program — that has gotten very little public comment. I didn’t think interest in AI would be in decline, and the Facebook/Twitter curves are quite surprising.
Suddenly I feel like Hari Seldon.
I’ll be back ...
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