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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ScottS" data-source="post: 4853544" data-attributes="member: 75465">...If you try the word 'camera' (i.e. a consumer product, and therefore a bit less apples-to-oranges to D&D than searches about nations/states), you also get the same downward trend. On the other hand, the numbers also dutifully spike upward every December, when (one might think) people are shopping for Xmas gadgets. 'Xbox' searches are flat (not declining), with the same sort of spikes at Xmas time (and another spike at May 05, which I assume was related to a model upgrade or something; haven't done console gaming for quite a while so no idea). 'iPhone' searches are a continuous spiky trend upward from Nov06 on. 'Harry Potter' trends slightly downward, with small spikes at Xmas and larger spikes (presumably) when new books and movies are released (again, I'm not a Potterphile, but the big jumps are at Jun04, Jul05, Nov05, Jul07, and perhaps another one starting this month; there's another movie about to come out, yes?).People using Google less over time (possibly migration to other search engines, as someone mentioned previously)?People 'radar-locking' onto favorite portal sites other than Google (discussed in part below)?...'USA' and 'Texas' gradually losing ground in the global 'marketplace of ideas' (if we want to get wildly speculative)?...Even if we have no clue what the reason for the fall-off is, couldn't we perhaps bake it into the D&D data in some way, rather than write the whole thing off?  (In my small amount of poking around, I haven't found a direct way to check 'total number of Google searches per month/year', to see if there is any 'Google decay';  I'm guessing they don't post those numbers directly.)Google has a dedicated Shopping feature, which is sortable lowest-to-highest price (i.e. you can theoretically 'find the cheapest whatzit on the whole Internet', although I don't know what all the limits are in practice).  Even if you have a favorite shopping site, like Amazon, there's no reason not to check other resources such as Google at least occasionally.  Presumably some portion of the user base does in fact do this, hence the relevance to product sales....whereas saying 'let's be careful in interpreting the data', and then not commenting on or interpreting it in any way (and thereby letting it drop off the front page), leads to precisely zero analysis...  hence my comment about 'dismissing' the Google data.  Apologies if I over-/mis-stated.I thought the consensus was 'people buying new product = new D&D gamers = healthy hobby'.  (I'm not even sure if I agree with that personally, but I'm pretty sure it's been suggested before, in 4e-acceptance arguments and the like.)</blockquote>

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