Underbelly 5: Trends

Here's a graph from Google Trends showing interest in "the underbelly project":

Note that the numbers are scaled, not absolute. The maximum number of searches on "the underbelly project" took place on 1 Nov. So that value was scaled to 100. The the values are then relative to that.

The trend so far is obvious. There was maximum interest the day after the story was published in The New York Times and The Sunday Times. Interest has been going down since then.

Note, however, this is different from the "hits" I've been noting in earlier posts. Those hits count webpages that have the phrase ("the underbelly project") on them. That number is cumulative and has been growing over time. At the moment it seems to have leveled off at around 68,000, where it was Wednesday evening. That leveling-off would seem to indicate that interest has peaked. Those who want to say something have pretty much said it.

It looks like the first phase of this story is over. What'll happen next? If something like this had been done 25 years ago, would it have made The New York Times?

ADDENDUM: Whoops! I spoke too soon. Now (8:44 AM) Google's giving me 82,000 hits, 14,000 more than 15 minutes ago.

ADDENDUM, 7:42 PM: Google's back to roughly 68K hits. I've noticed this kind of instability before. Don't really know what's going on.