Google shutting down their RSS reader didn't really have an impact.
They shut it down back in March of 2013. If you look at the trends graph[1] for RSS it was dying out for years.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
They shut it down back in March of 2013. If you look at the trends graph[1] for RSS it was dying out for years.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Here's the one for javascript:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascri...
Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait, that can't be right.
They're also a poor proxy for usage because the existing user base with feeds already set up doesn't have to do a search query to continue using it, so if a large number of them lose access at once, it's barely a blip because they wouldn't be doing searches for it either way.
If a metric is sufficiently decorrelated with the thing we want to measure, it should be ignored altogether, regardless of whether we have anything better.