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What Google Trends says about P2P in Japan

Earlier this week, Google released a new Labs app, Google Trends, allowing you to “see what the world is searching for”—this is what it says about P2P in Japan (numbers added for clarity):

Apparently, Winny is still a big hit when it comes to search queries—don’t know if this high volume of requests is an adequate reflection of its market share though. I also added the Japanese variant, ウィニー, to the set: “Winny” is clearly the preferred spelling, but ウィニー had a small boost recently (under influence of the mass media’s coverage maybe?). WinMX is also surprisingly well represented, although interest is clearly declining. And then, the surprise: Bittorrent/ビットトレント is merely a blip on the radar. This seems to confirm my personal experience here in Tokyo though: the number of people who has heard of Bittorrent (copyright specialists included) is very small. Even on the Copyright Subcommittee’s 2nd session about file-sharing I attended last year, there was absolutely no mention of Bittorrent. Some explanation about the sudden jumps in the graphs:

1. On May 10, 2004, Winny developer Isamu Kaneko is arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation.

2. Around September 21, 2005, the WinMX network ends its operations. The Winny spike might be related to the WinMX shutdown (people searching for other P2P software), but there is probably also another explanation: on September 20, the release date of Isamu Kaneko’s book, 『Winnyの技術』 (The Technology behind Winny), is announced.

3. From February until April 2006 then, there is a number of serious leaks of sensitive information through (infected) Winny installations, causing another spike in the Winny trend line.

Now, just to get a (relative, not absolute) idea of how many people have been searching for the keywords listed above: let’s plot the Winny graph against, say, iTunes.

Interesting result, isn’t it? About that one spike mid-2005:

4. In August, Apple launches the Japanese variant of its iTunes Music Store, an event that draws a lot of media attention and explains why there are briefly more queries for “iTunes” than for “Winny”.

Additional notes, in no particular order:

• “Winny” is not only P2P software, it’s also the name of a Japanese sausage—I doubt it distorts the trend line though.
• Just as a lot of Japanese say “pops” instead of “pop” (when talking about pop music), they also say “iTune” instead of “iTunes”. It’s probably fair to add up both graphs, and do the same with “Winny” and 「ウィニー」. However, even with these minor adjustments, the general picture stays the same.
• What is the relationship between queries and usage? Once you have iTunes or Winny installed, there is no need anymore for searching the application in question… Also: as the official Winny software has been taken down, it’s a bit hard to find—this might be one explanation for the high volume of “Winny” requests; people simply have to look harder to find a download site.
• Winny is slowly being replaced by Share, a new, closed-source P2P client that hooks in on the Winny network is similar to Winny. I haven’t included it here though, as “Share” is a rather generic name, resulting in a noisy trend line.
• And of course, Google’s own disclaimer: “[Google Trends] is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results.”