Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Sunday, February 8, 2015

#RootsTech in Google Trends

Google Trends is an interesting way to see online activity and watch how genealogy ebbs and flows. I decided to look at the history for #RootsTech over the past few years and here is the graph:


This is a very short summary of the history of #RootsTech showing that this is the fifth such conference. It is interesting to see that online interest peaked in 2013, but, of course, we haven't seen the peak for 2015 yet. I thought it might be interesting to compare the volume of searches with other genealogy topics. I added the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference and the National Genealogical Society Conferences. Here is the results:


I thought it might also be interesting to see how the trends went comparing RootsTech to the genealogy companies. Here is a chart comparing searches for the four big online companies to RootsTech:


You might have to click on the image to see an enlarged view. Ancestry.com seems to float way above the other three companies. This is probably a reflection of the amount of media advertising done by the company. One thing you may not notice from the graph is that FamilySearch.org searches just caught up with Ancestry.com for the first time. By the way, RootsTech disappears on this graph with barely visible bumps in searches.

To get some outside perspective. I added in the Super Bowl as a search term and took out RootsTech.


The Super Bowl managed to flat line everything else. I did wonder why 2015 for the Super Bowl went off the chart? Getting back to genealogy, I did a search on generic genealogy terms compared to FamilySearch, Family History Library and Family History Center. The generic terms flat line the other search terms.


I tried several other combinations but they all gave the same or very similar overall results. I am still wondering what the dramatic decline in searches for genealogy means. In this last graph, you can see that searches for family history and genealogy have converged for some time.


It will be interesting to see how much higher/lower the RootsTech searches are this year with all the entertainment and celebrity additions.

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