Hacker News Reader

Comment by OrderlyTiamat | Hacker News Reader

(not gp) Google trends favors wordle, with the peak being 5x as big for US and 3x worldwide [1]. Google trends is imperfect information, but it is evidence.

I think the comparison you did is hard to evaluate. the dev of wordle made 0k a day until sell, so that is an awkward comparison. The 50M downloads is hard to compare to 'more than a million daily players'.

Anyway, the difference between US and worldwide in google trends may point to some differences in experience, too. Wordle is quite big in the US, while flappy bird was bigger elsewhere. I'm not american and my experience matches yours, so just for fun I'm going to predict you are not american, but gp is, with 2:1 odds. Am I right?

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=wordle,f...

View on HN

Beware of comparing Google Trends data from different dates - the data is not "normalized". Consider, is it likely that "music" and "internet" are decaying in popularity - at the same rate, even?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=wordle,f...

I like the idea of comparing this via google trends! I didn't think of that option. I'll keep that in the back of my head for the future. Thanks!

Yes, I was aware that this is hard to compare in several aspects. Besides the money, you already talked about: One is something you have to download and the other is something you just visit a website for (That's the reason I mentioned the money and that those dl are not 'dead'). My aim was only to show 'something' that could make some comparison possible at all.

The commenter I initially replied to itched me the wrong way. He made his argument in more than one comment but even the two I read weren't consistent. Once he stated 20x bigger, in another comment it was 10-20x. I personally don't have a problem with wordle being bigger than flappy bird ^^ but the way he presented it seems random at best.

And, one more thing... I'm not American ;) +Edit: Earlier I shortly skimmed his/her profile and if I remember correctly he/she made a comment on something about the traffic in CA (or some US city)

hah, nice! And I definitely agree, better to have some numbers to constrain your beliefs than none at all.

Weren't most people going straight to the app store to download flappy bird? Not an option for Wordle. That should invalidate the Google Trends comparison.

Also since Wordle isn't on a nice wordle.com domain, my assumption is most people have to re-search for it frequently, boosting its Trends history.

Google trends just looks at search terms and counts them, or what does it do exactly? If so, you've got a point here.

Some contra-argument would be: There is more to it than just download (or play) something. For example all the articles, publicity, score boards and everything around it that rises when something gets popular. And this stuff does correlate with popularity (and search terms). Maybe those who downvoted you can clarify what they mean...

Yes i used similar data. Zooming in on Flappy bird, it also had a peak of search interest after the announcement of its removal on Feb 8, 2014 (supporting that more people likely learned about flappy bird after its removal was announced, than before)

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-01-25%202...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com