Google Trends shows sudden decline for Google.com

The metric provided is based on searches for google.com on google, and doesn't represent the website's usage. Perhaps some shortcut created or UI enhancement (like autocomplete) this year helped people stop searching for the search engine itself.

Here's a query in Google Trends for the word 'google' itself: http://www.google.com/trends?q=google&ctab=0&geo=all...