Google: internet interest in Quakers declining
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Google: internet interest in Quakers declining, originally uploaded by martin_kelley.
From Google Insights, a new service that tracks popularity of certain search phrases over time. See the chart here.
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What? No commentary or analysis? What do you think is going on? And what exactly is this graph measuring?
This was more just a Twitter-like post than a full-on blog post. This comes via a new service from Google that's making the rounds of the tech blogs this morning. You get to to chart the popularity of search phrases. Typing in "quaker" or "quakers" is too broad (oats, parrots, assorted Pennsylvania companies and high school sports teams) so I did "quakers friends" which I've found works well to isolate posts on the religious society.
I'm not sure it means anything. Just interesting to see it decline over time.
I am guessing that a lot of the early searches were by people who are Friends themselves or have regular business with Friends. Most such people must have bookmarked nearly every Quaker site they need by now, so that they need to search far less often.
@marshall: I've found that only a very small percentage of visitors to most Quaker sites are actually the kind of business Friend you describe. I don't think the entire body of Friends is big enough to make a dent in Google searches, even for our own denomination.
@all: I don't want to make too much of this chart, it was just something curious. It might represent all sorts of things. For example, maybe two-word searches in Google have declined over the past few years. Or maybe it's shifting demographics on the web and their different interests. I just typed in a bunch of denominations and they all drop the same way. I doubt it really has anything to do with us.
My first thought was that many people may have looked for us before and earlier in the war when they were hopeful that the peace movement might stop it. Just speculation, but if correct it's sad that interest in us would decline as the war has gone on, rather than increase.
Eileen
I was wondering if fewer people are taking the beliefnet quiz nowadays.
Robin, that's the first thing that jumped into my head as well! :)
Young adults (18-25) seem to use belief-net.com more than those of us who are "established". My son (age 25) tried it within the past few months -- equally weighted between liberal Quaker and Buddhist, apparently.