Genealogy vs Roots vs Ancestry

I was looking at the google trends for genealogy terms to see which ones were searched the most.  Also if there were country differences.   I chose three words:   “genealogy”, “roots” and “ancestry”.

What I found was interesting.   I noticed the “Genealogy” search term trend (blue line) has been drifting downwards rather significantly over the last five years. The  “Roots” (red line) search term has drifted downwards slightly but not as significantly as genealogy.  The searches for the term “Ancestry” (orange line) has been fairly consistent over time.  The graphs on the bottom part of the figure are showing news reference volumes.  It seems the term “Roots” is in the news more and not necessarily with reference to the genealogy context.

Even more interesting is the country distribution of people using these terms to search:

New Zealanders search the word “Genealogy” more than any others in the world.  (see graph below) Canadians like the search term “Roots” more than any other country.  Americans tend to search fairly evenly for both “genealogy” and “roots” as do the Australians.

Country distribution for the three search terms