What can Google Trends tell us about D&D?

[doctorhook]

Personally, I'm always checking out D&D stuff on the internet... and I never use Google for it. I can't even remember the last time I googled "D&D".

Why?

Because I already know where to go to find the best D&D news. I come to ENWorld.org. I go to dndinsider.com. Sometimes I go to RPG.net. I find links to cool D&D stuff through those community websites, which I have bookmarked.

I imagine that at least a portion of D&Ders are similar in this respect. It's not that D&D isn't being searched for on the internet, it's just that many of us bypass the search engine, because we've already found the websites we're looking for.

 

[Treebore]

Personally, I'm always checking out D&D stuff on the internet... and I never use Google for it. I can't even remember the last time I googled "D&D".

Why?

Because I already know where to go to find the best D&D news. I come to ENWorld.org. I go to dndinsider.com. Sometimes I go to RPG.net. I find links to cool D&D stuff through those community websites, which I have bookmarked.

I imagine that at least a portion of D&Ders are similar in this respect. It's not that D&D isn't being searched for on the internet, it's just that many of us bypass the search engine, because we've already found the websites we're looking for.

This is definitely a factor, and so is what Sir Brennan mentions. Key words are essential to finding relevant sites, so experienced "googlers" will use more key words to correctly direct search engines to precisely what we want to find.

 

[Noumenon]

If D&D searches are down because people who used to search for "D&D" are now searching for "greyhawk skill challenge DCs", that still means there were more new people entering the hobby before than now. There should be a steady supply of unsophisticated searchers.

Besides, if you look at how high "britney spears" ranks in the search trends every single year, you can tell that sophisticated searchers are somewhat rare. Who would google "Britney spears" when they could google "Britney spears sexy" or "Britney spears pregnant baby statue"? But they do.

Personally, I'm always checking out D&D stuff on the internet... and I never use Google for it. I can't even remember the last time I googled "D&D".

I bookmarked this Google search in Firefox and I gave it the keyword "en." So now all I have to do is type "en bloodseeker" or "en monte cook grapple" in the taskbar and it gives me the search results automatically. Saves a lot of clicks and typing.

 

[JDJblatherings]

So google trends is a "mostly for fun" analysis. It's a portion of searches and it calculates a relative volume based on some sort of location based sampling.

I'd say it "very selective" in what portions it uses for producing calculations, on "roleplaying" a big item was "guild wars" in 2005.

Salt lake city UTAH seems to be the #1 location for web searches for "dungeons and dragons".

 

[diaglo]

Salt lake city UTAH seems to be the #1 location for web searches for "dungeons and dragons".

go rent SLC punk.

 

[Bagpuss]

Look at all the interest they lost by not having D&D Insider ready on time...

Google Trends: D&D Insider

 

[jgbrowning]

Yeah, like I tried "Neverwinter Nights" and it has more people searching for it in 2004, two years before it came out, than in 2008, two years after. It's too bad because I actually thought that might be it -- video games displacing D&D.

Neverwinter Nights came out in mid-year 2002. The spike you're seeing is probably related to NW2. Compare the two and there's a fairly strong correlation, IMO.

joe b.

 

[JDJblatherings]

go rent SLC punk.

seen it.

I'm figuring the results have a lot more to do with the pop of the city being 180,000 or so and as such 10 searches there holds more weight then 100 would in NYC.

 

[Frostmarrow]

EnWorld seems to have attracted a lot of attention leading up to 4E but a steady decline afterwards. I blame the lack of interesting controversy in 4E. In all editions we could argue about alignmnent, paladins and broken elves but nowadays we quibble over whether D&D is fun at all.

 

[Raven Crowking]

In 3e, the OGL meant that locating 3pp doing interesting work was rewarded. And there were a lot of fan sites doing conversions. And statting things was more work, so it was often worthwhile to skim around and pick up bits and pieces of other's adventures.

IMHO, anyway.


RC