
Web hosting a downward trend? - nreece
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=312
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cperciva
Google trends is deceiving. I can only assume that the values shown are a
fraction of the total number of searches -- according to Google trends,
"linux" and "windows" have declined significantly in the past 4 years, while
"firefox" has stayed relatively constant since late 2004 aside from spikes
when releases occurred.

If I'm right about the plotted values being fractions of the total number of
queries, the apparent decline in "web hosting" is probably just an artifact of
the internet continuing to expand from the computer-literate to the computer-
illiterate: Those of us who would have any reason to care about web hosting
are simply being outnumbered.

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nreece
What puzzles me is that on one hand in the last 5 years or so most of these
search phrases have been on a downward trend, while Google Search popularity
and global penetration has increased over the same duration. Shouldn't nearly
every search phrase show an upward trend, due to the increase in search users?

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cperciva
_Shouldn't nearly every search phrase show an upward trend, due to the
increase in search users?_

That was my point -- I'm guessing that Google is normalizing these values by
dividing by the total number of searches. So if searches for "web hosting"
went from 1 million to 2 million, but those number are 0.002% and 0.001% of
the total number of searches respectively, the graph would show a decline.

