12-02-2012, 10:47 AM
MountainMan Wrote:Amazing...
Everyone is leaping to dire conclusions because "Google says so". This is the same "Google", may I remind you, that censors the internet on behalf of repressive governments.
Technically, Google said nothing. I didn't say anything one way or another. What they did say "here is a datapoint that represents the trending of a specific term." Any conclusion derived from this was a conclusion that individuals not affiliated with Google made.
At the same time, and I'm even going to throw this out as a professional opinion (I'm an analyst that deals with this sort of stuff from time to time), the conclusion is flawed. The main issue is that no one, no one, just searches "model railroad." They're looking at targeted searches for related terms. Real growth in the hobby is probably very low. But at the same time, the demographic that is interested in it is getting much more technologically savvy. This is a very important part. They're becoming less and less likely to just mash "MODEL TRAIN" and instead start searching things like "Athearn GP38-2."
The data being discussed here is way more complicated than anyone seems to think it is. If you look up something like, oh, Big Ten Football, you'd think that every year was the end of the conference and that every Michigan, Ohio State, Nebraska, and Penn State fan disappeared into the ether never to be seen again only to mysteriously appear again in the fall (at declining rates as well, because few college football fans actually search for "Big Ten Football" and not "Wisconsin 2009 schedule" when they want to see who Wisconsin lost to that season because of a bar argument about some QB).