Sorry To Bring Statistics Into This But...

I’m going to start off by saying that I’m glad we had the technical difficulties we had in class, because after watching “Days Gone By,” I can say with one hundred percent certainty that it would have driven me insane to split that up into two days. I’d never watched The Walking Dead before this class, but I can tell I’ll be watching it long after. Despite my busy schedule over the past few days I’m already four episodes in. But enough about my newest Netflix addiction, I want to talk about something I brought up in class Wednesday and do some research to see if I was on to anything.

We were discussing the article “Why Have Zombie Stories Become So Popular in thePast 10-15 Years” by Bradley Voytek. The article showed the following graph to demonstrate a rise in zombie popularity over the aforementioned time period.

Now, my biggest issue with this graph (and one I brought up in class) was that Google, as with any online technology has been expanding over this time period. It is one thing to use Google search data to analyze trends over a few months or even a year, but I had my doubts about that graph. So I did some internet digging. I ended up on a website called Internet Live Stats. They provided me with this graph, tracking Google’s overall search traffic.

 To me it looks like the zombie searches started to pick up around 2009, which is when Google’s overall traffic started to pick up as well. So, I’m going to have to say that, no, those search statistics are not quite as impressive as they initially were. I still agree with a majority of Voytek’s argument, but this is one piece of evidence he should have left out.