Genealogy Search Trend on Google

Randy at GeneaMusing's has done a series on the decline in traffic at many of the top 50 genealogy sites based on their Alexa ranking. These include Genealogy Link Sites, Genealogy Social Network sites, and Commercial Genealogy sites.

I thought I would take a look at the Google trend of searches over the past few years for the keyword genealogy.


Google Trends analyzes Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for a term relative to the total number of searches done on Google over a period of years. The declining blue line shows that relative to other searches, genealogy has declined as a search word supporting Randy's findings of declining web traffic at top genealogy sites.


Google doesn't supply numbers for the search traffic and the chart is for the relative number of searches, not absolute numbers. But I was really surprised to see the downward trend.

The bottom line on the chart measures the number of Google News References to genealogy. Some of the spikes mention the introduction of large databases.