Chocolate, Antiques and Collectibles Buying and Selling Trends

Mouse likes maths. Lately he has been studying the trends on the web of his favorite things, antiques, collectibles and chocolate. He has been investigating Google Labs and Google Trends. This lets you know the volume of traffic in Google searches (right hand axis) per year (bottom axis). It is normalised which will allow for the increase in human and mouse users with time. It is not perfect but an interesting guide. He looked over the period from 2004 to the start of 2008.



He was very happy to note that chocolate had not shown any decline, ‘whilst there’s chocolate there’s life’ is one of his favorite sayings. Collectibles has declined a bit but not as much as antiques in general. Is this because fewer people are clicking, or, newer users are not so interested in antiques? Mouse is smart, he thinks a bit of both. A number of his investigations have suggested a roughly 50% decline in activity in a number of traditional areas, even digital photography, his favorite hobby, has fallen. The antiques field is a little worse.
Mouse cannot decide whether he likes a collectible or an antique for Christmas. He notes that fellow mice tend to prefer collectibles for Christmas and antiques in the New Year, chocolate is good anytime. With a thoughtful look he indicates, ‘that too much blogging makes you hungry’, not enough chocolate he murmurs, he’s off now, bye.