Google search patterns suggest declining interest in the environment

• Published in: Biodiversity and conservation Vol. 22; no. 6-7; pp. 1355 - 1367
• Main Authors: Mccallum, Malcolm L., Bury, Gwendolyn W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.06.2013; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Applied ecology; Biodiversity; Biological and medical sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Climate change; Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts; Conservation Biology/Ecology; Conservation, protection and management of environment and wildlife; Database searching; Ecology; Environment and sustainable development; Environmental protection; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects; Global temperature changes; information sources; Internet; Internet/Web search services; Life Sciences; Online searching; Original Paper; Public concern; public opinion; Public policy; Search engines; Google; Environment; Google insights for search; Public opinion; Sustainability; System sustainability; Sustainable development
• ISSN: 0960-3115; 1572-9710
• DOI: 10.1007/s10531-013-0476-6

Public interest in most aspects of the environment is sharply declining relative to other subjects, as measured by internet searches performed on Google. Changes in the search behavior by the public are closely tied to their interests, and those interests are critical to driving public policy. Google Insights for Search (GIFS) was a tool that provided access to search data but is now combined with another tool, Google Trends. We used GIFS to obtain data for 19 environment-related terms from 2001 to 2009. The only environment-related term with large positive slope was climate change. All other terms that we queried had strong negative slopes indicating that searches for these topics dropped over the last decade. Our results suggest that the public is growing less interested in the environment.