Google offers a website to analyze trends in website traffic. Being quasi a monopolist, Google gives an accurate picture of what people are interested in. Check out trends for Obama or SARS or even iphone.
Now here are the trends for CISV:
It does seem like a bit of a downward trend to me, which I find hard to understand. Let's look at out total number of sent participants as a comparison (unfortunately only up to 2007):
So how come the slight growth in our participation during the same time period is not reflected in the "internet buzz"?
Now here are the trends for CISV:
It does seem like a bit of a downward trend to me, which I find hard to understand. Let's look at out total number of sent participants as a comparison (unfortunately only up to 2007):
So how come the slight growth in our participation during the same time period is not reflected in the "internet buzz"?
thats a wicket tool!
indeed its quite strange why less people google cisv with an upward trend of participation... i got a little into the trends and wanted to get a frame of reference, so i googletrended amnesty international and unesco which both have a downward trend, so i figured maybe theres just an overall downward trend of interest in peace education and that field? (which if u googletrend it "peace education" has a downward trend as well), or does it mean that people bookmark those websites? in a perfect world maybe...
then i searched the trend of uno which goes up slightly...
for fun i checked for facebook... it's ridiculous :D
Paul - the facebook trend indeed is ridiculous. I'm starting to think that the Google trend only has some value with stuff, that enters the mainstream, or is covered by big media. But sill, it's a conundrum: CISV has grown (a bit), improved its websites, switched important communication over to the internet, and the total trend is downward. Strange.
Hi,
Nick, is this statistics a google trends statistic or a googel website trends statistic?
Because the google trends statistic works like this:
"Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results – our Search Volume Index graph."
So, this trend could be interpreted in more than just one way- it could be, that the overall searches in google increased more than the google searches of CISV- also, it could be that more people don't google CISV but go directly to the CISV webpage (not via google)....
To me, it's always kind of brave to find some kind of causality within statistics that are done on such a unspecified basis...
This trend just says that the proportion of google searches of the term "CISV" in all google searches got less.
I don't think that the comparison between the googling of CISV and the number of participants is accurate with the new technological facilitations.
What I mean is I used to google everything I wanted to know about CISV in the old days, but now I have a long list of bookmarks that takes me to wherever I want - and I know what I want is in which website. I think it's that we have organized ourselves more and now we all know what is where that we no longer need to google it. A good thing to look at also is the history of the curiosities each month on JBPedia. It shows you the percentage of people who fall on JBPedia from google, and you can clearly see it has gone down since JBPedia started.
@Babsi: It's Google Trends - so it's exactly as you say: The index represents the number of searches.
I don't think the numbers are going down, because the overall amount of searches went up. I'm sure the Search Volume Index takes care of that.
I agree that it is totally unscientific to hypothesize why the number of searches are going down - but still it looks like a significant trend, and we should wonder why and if it has any implications.
Our own stats you can see here:
https://joyce.cisv.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.cisv.org
Stats go back to March 2007. If somebody (Nick?) wants to play I have all logs since 2004.
really we have 150.000 hits per month?? impressive!
for god's sake, let's please invest some money and build a decent, modern-looking website!