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> John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of ti
by ysavir 10y ago
> John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The charts produced by the Google Trends service show Facebook searches peaked in December 2012 and have since begun to trail off.
Well, yeah... The more people are already familiar with facebook, the less they will be googling/researching it. If anything, considering the popularity of Facebook at the time, it should have been seen as a sign of vitality.
I'm pretty disappointed that the Princeton researchers were so blinded by googlinums that they forget those googlinums don't exist in a vacuum. Probably why mechanical and aerospace engineers aren't fit to make predictions of a social nature (among other engineers, too, sadly).
- cag_ii 10y agoNot to mention people who use facebook only through the phone app are not likely to ever search for facebook on google. I'm often amazed at how almost-completely phones have replaced "desktop computers" for many people I know (Anecdotal, I know).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sparkzilla 10y agoI agree with this to the extent that I don't even care if my site ranks well on Google. The traffic coming directly from Facebook is so much greater.
- mattnumbe 10y agoI've been in Japan for the last 7 years and it always bewilders me that so few people own desktop/laptop computers here but everybody is on the internet 24/7. (possibly not only anecdotal...)
- MaulingMonkey 10y agoI've heard explanations for this involving smaller, more space constrained apartments - and thus less interest in filling it up with yet another machine (tm) and less interest in spending time cramped up at home. This also goes hand in hand with e.g. PC Bangs being more popular over there.
- fian 10y agoI wonder if this might also go some way towards explaining the salary-man phenomenon. Where employees do excessive overtime at the office. Presumably at the office, they have a work provided laptop/desktop and internet connection. Also the office space may be more spacious in total than their apartments with most of the amenities of home. Thus they may derive a benefit from staying at the office during the evening rather than going home to a smaller space and no computer.
- maruhan2 10y agoThis is precisely the case for me. I neither have proper space nor the interest to have a computer at home. When I come home from work, spending time on the phone handles everything.
- maruhan2 10y agoPC bangs popular in Japan? I don't know the answer, but I doubt that since Japan doesn't play enough pc games.
- sumedh 10y agoLot of people in India did not even use desktops because of the high costs they directly jumped to mobile.
- aedron 10y agoIt is possible shrinking PCs/all-in-ones will make a difference in this. A nicely designed all-in-one PC is a lot more palatable and manageable to the average person than the old tower/cables/monitor/speakers/etc.
- StringyBob 10y agoI assume people, (even tech savvy HN readers) access sites as a search because it's less effort than urls, typo resistant, and almost all browsers installed now have search built in - it's not a sign of a naïve user. However, i'd assume for Facebook a much larger % of users are now via smartphones - so get their fix directly through the app, with no search engine involvement.
- throwaway7645 10y agoLooking at one poor analysis and concluding engineers aren't fit for social observations is a bit of a stretch. Our job is literally analysis of problems and formulations of solutions. You win some, you lose some.
- jacalata 10y agoYou seem to be assuming their conclusion was based on only this data point.
- jschwartzi 10y agoYou seem to be assuming that the conclusion is based on the data. This could just be an example of labeling.
- azinman2 10y agoGoogling facebook is how many people access it and other things. That will probably correlate more to a older and less savvy audience, but should still give a decent proxy in terms of popularity of the web property. What it _doesn't_ take into account is mobile app usage, which might have been what sucked in all those people vs just total loss.
- spanishgum 10y agoEven on a desktop / laptop, many people probably use the browser's auto-complete or bookmarks for access.
- ClassyJacket 10y agoI just have it permanently open now.
- ubernostrum 10y agoTalk to people who run usability studies and ask how many users know that the browser can do these things. People joke about "my grandfather opens his browser and types 'Yahoo' into Bing, clicks the link and types 'Google' in to Yahoo, clicks the link and types 'Facebook' into Google to get to Facebook", but it's not that wild an exaggeration of how much of the developed world -- which is not computer-literate -- uses the web. That's part of why walled gardens and native-feeling app experiences are so successful.
- dools 10y agoAlso interesting to note that they say Facebook Google searches peaked in 2012, which was also the year Facebook shifted their focus to mobile phones according to this MediaWiki article/timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Facebook#Product_and_accessibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Facebook#Product_a...
- abiox 10y ago> mechanical and aerospace engineers aren't fit to make predictions of a social nature this seems like a hasty generalization. it's probably fair to say that a mechanical engineering education is unlikely to include much depth in topics of a "social nature". (of course, there's nothing stopping a mechanical engineer from diving in, be it formal education or self-directed.) that said, identifying one's assumptions (such as: a decreasing search trend implies decreasing interest or utilization) is an important facet of any sort of research, be it "social" or not. i think describing this as a "science/engineering geeks aren't qualified to talk about social stuff" situation seems to miss the mark.
- cryptozeus 10y agoHaha exactly my thought....author clearly does not use Facebook or internet for that matter
- logicallee 10y agoLittle did the researchers realize, the reason for the fall-off in Google searches for Facebook is that Google itself peaked in 2014 and as epidemiological models which are clearly applicable to everything show, Google must have lost about 91% of its users over the last three years, which the researchers failed to control for. However, this is small wonder, given that viral epidemiological data (which is clearly applicable to everything) shows that Princeton itself peaked in 2008. The smart researchers must (clearly) be somewhere else, as clearly nothing can last except for eternal truths from other irrelevant disciplines. I wonder what the next hot university is?
- firebones 10y agoThe combination of mobile use, plus autocomplete of browser history should explain almost all of this.
- sjg007 10y agoIt's ok.. they will just publish another paper in 5 years how they were wrong and now mobile is the answer. However, that Facebook doesn't have a phone is a problem. People have to download and install the app. I would imagine many Android users google Facebook to install the app. So then, the study may actually be valid.
- nradov 10y agoFacebook pays several Android device vendors to preinstall their mobile app as bloatware / crapware. Users can disable the Facebook app but they can't totally uninstall it.
- jayajay 10y agoSociety = Google + O(ε) An aerospace engineer might be able to rattle off all of the important higher order and relativistic corrections to the hydrogen atom, but when it comes to society...
- NicoJuicy 10y agoI think people started realizing that typing fa instead of Facebook was good enough ( I did)
- elwell 10y ago> fa You get as far as the 'a'?
- ZeljkoS 10y agoFacebook actually did a hilarious debunking: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-develin/debunking-princeton/10151947421191849/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-develin/debunking-prince...