The other day while surfing the web, I stumbled upon Kevin's Virginia Family Tree - a genealogy resource. His article, What's up with Rootsweb and Ancestry?, regarding the controversy of Ancestry.com's assimilation of RootsWeb is what caught my eye.

In the article Kevin made the following observation:

If you look at Google trends, genealogy searches are falling off more each year. You cannot fault Ancestry for trying to expand their market reach in these trying times.

At first glance, I thought that can't be right. It sort runs counter to what I would have thought was growing trend in web searches. So I decided to follow-up on this and see for myself what Kevin was talking about. I visited Google Trends which describes itself as a place where you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics and you can see a snapshot of what's on the public's collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. Here I did a query on the keyword "genealogy" and saw for myself that since 2004 there has been a steady drop in searches for the keyword "genealogy". Interesting! I did not know that.

What is also interesting to note from the chart provided by Google is that in the section of the chart that tracks "news references" to "genealogy" is that there has been a significant of amount activity in the past two years (2007-2008) compared to the previous three years recorded. What's up with that?