Last week, the Google Blog posted a story about search trends and video game systems, namely a comparison between searches for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii.
Looking at the Google Trends graph next to an Alexa Traffic Graph (reach) for xbox.com, playstation.com, and wii.com, you can see mostly the same trends. In 2005-Q4, the Xbox is clearly the winner in both searches and traffic, for very good reason: of the three, it was the only one actually available. The traffic for “Playstation 3” correlates to the Tokyo Game Show, at which several games for the (then non-functional) system were demoed. The name “Wii” was only officially announced in 2006-Q2, which shows up as a bump in searches, at flag A. This does not translate into traffic for wii.com because the domain was parked until at least July of that year, which can be verified by taking a look at the Wayback Machine.
All three consoles have search and traffic surges in 2006-Q4; since then, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have been neck-and-neck in both traffic and searches, though their reach appears to be increasing. Wii, however, has remained level, after the initial peak. If you compare wii.com and nintendo.com, the name announcement and the console launch are both clearly visible. In actuality, the news volume (which is down) more closely resembles the traffic for Nintendo (and Wii) than the number of searches. So the question becomes: what will happen to Wii this winter? Is it just a late bloomer?
