Who's Searching for Meditation and Yoga?
For those who do not know, Google has a service called [Google Trends](http://www.google.com/trends; a service that can show how many people have been searching for a topic at a time, and where the searches were most popular. Just for fun, I did a trend search for both meditation and yoga. Below are the results (you may need to click on the pictures to see them clearly).
Meditation Worldwide:
This graph above shows how often the term "meditation" was searched (top half), while the bottom half shows how often it showed up in the news. The graph goes all the way back to 2004. It shows that meditation searches have declined since 2004 (oh no!), but are appearing more in the news.
Here is the break down on who is the most popular country and cities searching for meditation (you might need to click on it to see it more clearly):
India comes in first with the most searches (the top two cities are also in India), followed by Australia, New Zealand and the United states is in fourth. The other top cities are in the US and Australia.
Now because I personally live in the US, here is the breakdown from the United States:
Interestingly, the states with the most meditation searches are mostly "Blue States" (States that usually vote Democrat or Liberal), with the exception of Colorado (which is a swing state) and Arizona (which is a red state, and tend to vote Republican or Conservative).
Now let's take a look at the results for the search term "Yoga":
Worldwide searches:
Looking at the search trends from the past few years, one will notice that there is a spike every new year. Sounds like some people are trying to make yoga a New Years Resolution (I wonder if they stuck to it). Interestingly, yoga appearing the news has also made an increase the past few years.
When we break the searches down by country we get this:
India is once again in the lead (no surprise really, it is in the area where yoga was born), followed by Canada, Singapore, and then the United States. Although India is the most popular country searching for yoga, all of the top cities are in Canada and the US.
Speaking of the US, here is the breakdown by state:
The most popular states are once again blue states, with the exception of Arizona and Colorado. The most popular state is New York (YAY! MY STATE!).
Anyway, just some interesting results I wanted to share. Remember, these results are based on searches-not necessarily who meditates/does yoga the most.
If you want to try Google Trends for yourself, here's the link:
Happy Meditating!
-Seth