Interesting: FRC in Google Searches

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

The secondary peak (corresponding to championships, maybe?) is getting comparatively smaller as time progresses, as well.

Originally Posted by EmileH

I would assume this peak is when the competition season starts, seeing as the interactive graph showed that as March.

Originally Posted by messer5740

First peak is kickoff. EVERYONE googles EVERYTHING they can about the kickoff and robots of previous years.

An interesting thing to note is that if you drop FIRST from the query, the March peak becomes much stronger than the January peak, March increasing year over year relative to January rather than declining. I'll toss out this hypothesis to explain this counter-trend, but I can't think of a test for it:

The January peak is primarily FIRST insiders (including former FIRST members and mentors), looking for info on this year's game. Year over year, there is little or even negative growth because most of the veterans know to go to usfirst.com (now firstinspires.com) or chiefdelphi.com or their old team website or TBA or somewhere like that, rather than querying google.

The March peak is primarily FIRST outsiders, who have heard of the robotics competition going on through friends and family members, but who didn't catch on to the name "FIRST", and if they did, they may have search for "1st".

If this hypothesis is true, this means that the word is increasingly getting out beyond the FIRST insiders year over year.