

Google searches for "VPN" are spiking this week in the US - zissou
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q

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cjbprime
Could be related to the Yahoo! policy change, since part of the story is that
Marissa Mayer ran analytics on how their VPN was being used and concluded that
many remote workers weren't working much:

"Mayer explained the rationale at Yahoo’s “Friday FYI,” its equivalent of
Google’s TGIF. ”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even
logged into the VPN…” she apparently said."

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codezero
This is probably related to the Copyright Alert System, or "Six Strikes" rule
that many ISPs have adopted.

VPN is the best way around this and it costs next to nothing.

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zissou
OP here. Should have posted sooner before it looks like my post got flagged?

I think the shock[1] is being caused by the Copyright Alert System put into
place on Monday by Comcast. Here's why:

Comcast is the largest ISP in the US, so a change of their piracy policy (the
exogenous shock in my story/model) is likely provide a large enough segment of
Internet users (definitely bigger than the set of Yahoo employees or SimCity
fans) with the appropriate incentives to search for information about VPNs.
The logic here is simple.

[1]There is clear weekly periodicity in the 90 day chart. If you were to
detrend the data and remove the autocorrelation, the spike would look even
sharper.

Based on the data and the normalizations on the data that Google does, 90 day
data is much better than 12 month data because the latter is not daily data
anymore -- it is data aggregated weekly. Since it is obviously clear that the
data has weekly periodicity, aggregating the data at the weekly-level ignores
the fact that how many searches there are for "VPN" on a given day depends on
what day of the week it is.

Calling this wild speculation, incorrect, random noise, or comparing it to
weekly or monthly data is just not very good statistics in my mind.

EDIT: Also, for clarification Google Trends data is search volume data
normalized on an index from 0 to 100 where 100 is the relative maximum over
the series. Tuesday's index value was 100, with Monday's being the second
highest over the 90 day period. So technically, yes, search volumes for VPN
are currently spiking this week. I'm really curious to see what happens when
Wednesday's data is released.

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mey
Yet drastically down compared over a larger timeline.
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&c...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&cmpt=q)

~~~
hndude
My guess is that that gradual decline over time may be related to more people
getting online. Put another way - when the internet's use was limited to more
tech-savvy people, this term was searched a higher percentage of the time than
today.

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nthitz
Much more drastic are searches for seedboxes
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=seedbox&geo=US&#...</a><p>edit: for
those that don't know, seedboxes are servers you rent that just run
bittorrent. Makes it easy to skirt around these 6 strikes programs

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antoko
Great job on wild speculation HN!

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&d...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&date=1%2F2011%201m&cmpt=q)

~~~
Diamons
That's 2011.

~~~
antoko
that's a 2 year timeline jan2011-jan2013 showing clearly that this latest
"spike" isn't anything of the sort.

EDIT my apologies, I was supposed to link this

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&d...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&date=1%2F2011%2025m&cmpt=q)

~~~
noecker
There actually is a decided uptick in vpn activity if you expand the date
selection correctly. It is a decided uptick; the highest weekly search volume
in the past 2 years.

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&d...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=VPN&geo=US&date=1%2F2011%2027m&cmpt=q)

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ars
No they aren't. Look at a longer graph. What you are seeing is just random
noise.

Flagged as incorrect.

~~~
jasallen
It's not 'incorrect' -- clearly the flat trend has existed long enough for
this 'spike' to represent something other than random noise. Would you say
that the dips on weekends are 'random noise'? No, they too represent a trend,
though if we zoom out far enough they would get lost in the lack of precision.

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Pezmc
SimCity is being released soon, VPN for getting access 3 days early if you're
in Europe may be the case.

~~~
nthitz
I think it's more to do with the USA's new six strikes program.

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lessnonymous
So what's with the Dakotas and Wyoming? No interwebs?

Edit: Missed Alaska and Vermont

