I read a post gauging the popularity of
homeopathy using Google Trend search. The interesting thing was all the other searches he tried to verify that the trend search could be trusted. For example, if there's no Glastonbury festival one year, there's no spike in the graph that year. Led Zeppelin searches are steady except when they did their reunion tour.
So naturally I searched on
"Dungeons & Dragons" and
"D&D". "Dungeons & Dragons" has shown quite a trail off since early 2006. It didn't even peak when
4E came out. "D&D" may be more representative. That did peak in May when
KotS came out, but the baseline is still clearly lower than it was up till the beginning of 2006.
So what happened in the beginning of 2006 that made people stop searching for D&D? It's not
"World of Warcraft", whose searches have been declining since January of 2007.
"Magic the Gathering" is declining too. Was there some kind of change in the population of Google searchers, or is this a real trend? What else could we search on to see what's happening here?
"Naruto"? "xkcd"? At least some things I like are still going up.
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