Google: internet interest in Quakers declining



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.

8 thoughts on “Google: internet interest in Quakers declining

  1. 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.

    1. @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.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

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