More and more people have accessed to the internet but the first to be there were “intellectuals” (engineers, nerds and geeks, teachers etc.) who searched about content. Then came the business but that is not over…

In a near past, it was difficult to understand how to understand how a computer worked and set up the internet and to pay for the service etc.

Now, if you do not know how to use the minimum (even my father !) of it, one can laugh at you.

So, more people go for it but fewer and fewer use it as it was operated in the past, otherwise the RSS revolution would have taken place (I consider it a revolution).

Here, I saw girls of 14 years old NEVER OPEN A BROWSER.
They instead directly open “Messenger” and chat. That’s all. May-be youtube a bit if someone gives a link. They of course know how to browse but hardly do it.

They can look on words like “Britney spears” but requests about “dark matter” will obviously and statistically be diluted by the mass and their needs and use.

The given statistics are meaningless, as they do not survey the great Dark Web.

It only shows up prominently if there is already an entry with the search tag, not necessarily if you’re looking for a keyword that might only appear in some other entry. Also, I too use a lot the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, so if I want to go straight to a certain site I will add a keyword just to make sure it’s the right one. Either way, the problem with Wikipedia I have is that it’s the least common denominator of many people’s opinions. It might work well for a while as long as stuff is actually based on textbooks etc, but I am afraid there might be a backlash at some point. The more people come to rely on Wikipedia and Google, the more likely it becomes that certain not-so-common opinions, derivations, references get lost. I am waiting for the generation of students who don’t know what to do when a keyword isn’t on Wikipedia. Yes, Wiki is useful as a check whether you’re correct (though I’ve had confusing moments where there were mistakes in Wikipedia entries), but I am afraid people might come to believe it’s omniscient instead of being commonscient. Best,

B.

I think it’s a bit more confusing than worrisome. Why are people searching for Wikipedia? Google nearly always shows the Wikipedia entry when a search is done. But Wikipedia itself is quite a useful tool. It’s correct and informative often enough to be useful for informal queries, and if you’re interested in making sure you’re correct, the references are usually good.

- digg, /. et. al. lead people within those communities to sites of interest via tag-based searches and “front page” stories. When a site has a story of interest and gets buried under massive traffic, google is irrelevant to that, unless it appears on the google news page. it’s generically called being slashdotted and that’s for a reason. As a secondary effect, these many page views become links on blogs, etc, which next time the google spiders roll through becomes a higher page ranking.

- as the internet has reached full maturity, which I believe has occurred within the last few years with the growth to adulthood of the “facebook generation,” the proportion of browsers with highly developed bookmark/rss libraries increases. A typical behavior when someone gets interested in a subject is to do one massive google session based on a general term (”astronomy,” or, god help you, “mortgage”), then weed out the massive results pile down to a few usable sites. Future browsing in that subject is then done either by searching for more specific terms, or by following links from the primary cluster of subject-related sites.

- within the above point I’d emphasis the importance of rss feeds. Once you have found a site or two you like, you grab the feeds, and you may never really need to search on that subject again, unless you need very specific info, in which case your search will be narrowly specified.

I have actually withdrawn from the rss firehose in recent months, as part of an effort to decrease my incoming brainwidth usage, freeing up more cycles for creative and outgoing usage.

It appears that interest in math subjects has a high periodicity, correlated to the school year, I guess.

‘algebra’ peaks in September and troughs in December.

‘calculus’ peaks just before final exams (dudes: if you wait until May to start Googling the subject, your finals probably aren’t going to go very well).

both of them have a lull in the summer of course.

‘fourier series’ has an interesting square wave pattern - 2006 even has a little Gibbs phenomenon going on. Pretty cool, huh?

The y-axis is -RELATIVE- search volume, fraction of total searches that are for a certain phrase. If it wasn’t, all curves would be growing since total usage of Internet (and google) is climbing rapidly.

So, when more people use the internet for more varied activities, it follows that pretty much all terms will decline. Especially those terms that where frequent among the early adopters.

A few years back, academia and students was a lot larger part of the internet-population than it is today. I’d thus expect pretty much ALL terms that students use much more often than the general population to decline.

This says nothing whatsoever about the interest of the general population. Other than, the general population is more interested in using the internet for more varied activities than they used to be.

A Hazy Future for a ‘Jewel’ of Space Instruments

I don’t google for science much… since the stuff I read is usually well-linked and direct.

Picking out the temporal trends is kinda fun. Yeah, I’m a geek, and well, watching you guys count photons is part of why I read blogs like this. Try: tax form, scarf (but swimsuit peaks in Febuary, I guess with the SI issue), earthquake, pumpkin, depression. I’ve found plenty of annual rhythyms, and plenty of random ones (like earthquake)…any thoughts on things that would have more interestig patterns than that?

Also, the fact that trends have been down for most search terms can be explained simply by there being more information out there, more events, and therefore more different searches. So we should expect decreases across the board.