Occupy Movement Losing Steam, Google Data Shows

As Weather Turns Cold, Authorities Lose Patience

By George J. Wienbarg, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, November 03, 2011

As the balmy fall weather turns into winter, if Google traffic for the erstwhile movement is anything to go by, the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be heading indoors.

The popular search engine has indicated that traffic searches for the movement have taken a downturn.

Taking two of the major movements as bellweathers, Occupy Los Angeles and Occupy Wall Street, searches for information on each movement has significantly dropped. The metrics are provided by Google Trends.

Political polls and Google Trends operate differently, but the analysis is a telling sign of public interest.

Also, most "Occupy" protesters are from the digital generation, and are quite likely to use Google to research the movement.

Google analyzes a representative portion of Google web searches, similar to a political poll, to compute how many searches have been executed on each topic relative to the total number of searches carried out. Google then graphs the results with its Search Volume Index.

Today New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg lost his patience as he told the press, “This isn’t an occupation of Wall Street [any more], it is an occupation of a growing, vibrant residential neighborhood in lower Manhattan, and it’s really hurting small business and families.

Bloomberg says the situation is being “monitored.”