Seriously people, stop falling for this statistical misrepresentation/misinformation nonsense. If the interest in a term peaked, does not mean that any significant number of people looked it up. I have compared the term with NBA and Cats to get two generic comparisions:

The percentages in the lower part show how often the term was looked up relatively speaking. So NBA was usually looked for 30-40 times as much and cats was looked for 15-20 times as much.

So compared to all searches, we are talking about maybe something in the range of one in a few hundred thousands to maybe on in a few thousand searches.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure what's being misrepresented, it's obvious that its in comparison to itself and nothing else

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 hours ago

It is represented as as relevant event. But if normally 5 people google it on an average day and then 50 people googled it, it is still completely irrelevant.

By not providing how many people in total have looked up the term, this information is meaningless, but people upvote it because they want to believe that is is a relevant amount of people who looked it up, because it makes them feel right or whatever.

You also find this in the comments in this thread where people argue whether "oligarchy" is a term that is generally known or requires higher education.

We also saw some "news articles" based on just looking at how the relative change of a terms searches was, suggesting this is in any way meaningful despite the reasons it is not without further context.

[–] asdfasdfasdf 5 points 12 hours ago

So basically "peak == relative to the history of that specific term"? That seems obvious to me and not sure how someone could interpret it differently. Nothing I seem implies that number of searches for "oligarchy" is higher than any other searches for other words.