A few weeks ago our dojo had the good fortune to reconnect with a talented Aikidoka from Australia.\u00a0 He had visited us about four years prior, and was back in the States for, of all things, his honeymoon.\u00a0 Putting aside any other plans for the evening, our friend attended Sensei’s class, and later taught a very interesting class himself.<\/p>\n
That evening, as we caught up at the local watering hole, our conversation turned to (of course!) Aikido.\u00a0 I had mentioned that Google had some interesting statistics regarding Aikido as a search query. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this topic deserved its own post.<\/p>\n
Google As Gatekeeper<\/strong><\/p>\n As you probably know, Google is the dominant search engine on the web.\u00a0 What you may not know is that Google is also an amazing aggregator of information.\u00a0 Search terms, or in Google parlance “keywords”, are\u00a0an important way we\u00a0signal interest online.\u00a0 If we want to find, say, Thai food in Jacksonville, we\u00a0search the keywords “Thai food” and “Jacksonville.”\u00a0 Similarly, if we want to learn about Aikido, we search “Aikido”.\u00a0 It’s helpful in this context to think of keywords as an electronic vote.<\/p>\n But Google does much more than just match content providers with users.\u00a0 It also stores<\/em> this information, in a way that is, at least partially, accessible to us.\u00a0 The front end for this trove of data is called Google Trends.<\/a> Go ahead, try it out. I’ll wait.<\/p>\n For our purposes, the significance of Google Trends is this: Over time, the popularity of a search query,\u00a0such as\u00a0“Aikido”, can be a useful barometer of public interest in that subject, or at least that portion of the public with the resources to search the web.<\/p>\n Aikido, Tae Kwon Do, and MMA<\/strong><\/p>\n So, how does Aikido stack up? Let’s take a look<\/a>.\u00a0Although the view we have is\u00a0fairly limited, the chart does show trends, and in our case,\u00a0the trend is\u00a0not pretty.\u00a0 But is this unique to\u00a0Aikido?\u00a0 What about other martial arts, say Tae Kwon Do, or MMA?<\/p>\n First Tae Kwon Do<\/a>.\u00a0 Perhaps not surprisingly, Tae Kwon Do, as a traditional martial art, is faring little better than Aikido. (Although its inclusion in the Olympics have resulted in some temporary, albeit impressive, spikes.)<\/p>\n MMA, or mixed martial arts, is a different story altogether. I can’t help but feel a twinge of envy as I look at that rising curve<\/a>. Whether MMA remains popular, of course, is an open question.<\/p>\n Lastly, out of curiosity, I searched “Steven Seagal”<\/a>. By my reading, it doesn’t appear that the decline in popularity of “Aikido” as a search query has any real correlation to the popularity of our favorite Aikidoka \/ actor \/ musician<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now the disclaimer: I have no formal training in statistics and lack the background to perform any real analysis of these trends, (even assuming Google made available more granular data.)<\/p>\n Having said that, I do find that these trends back up my own anectodal experience.\u00a0 Your thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few weeks ago our dojo had the good fortune to reconnect with a talented Aikidoka from Australia.\u00a0 He had visited us about four years prior, and was back in the States for, of all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-jerry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}