19 October 2018

What's DNA worth to Ancestry?


These trend lines, produced by Google Trends, show the five year evolution to the present of the number of web searches worldwide involving the term Ancestry.
The blue line is for a simple "Ancestry" search, the red for "Ancestry DNA". The values are normalized to 100 at the "Ancestry" peak.

Ancestry DNA is responsible for the growth in Ancestry since 2015. Elsewhere in the company progress is powered by fumes in the innovation tank. A decline in searches for Ancestry and Ancestry DNA since late last year is also apparent.

For the five year period the top five countries from where "Ancestry" searches were conducted were: United Kingdom (100); Australia (87); New Zealand (85); United States (74); Canada (55).

For the last 90 days they are: United Kingdom (100), New Zealand (76), Australia (71), United States (70), Ireland (62). Canada comes 6th at 54.

For the five year period for "Ancestry DNA" searches the leading countries were: United States (100), New Zealand (82), Australia (58), Canada (57), United Kingdom (48).

For the last 90 days they are: New Zealand (100), United States (95), Canada (81), United Kingdom (81), Australia (76).

Does anyone have thoughts on the prominence of New Zealand?



1 comment:

Toni said...

No idea why New Zealand. I wish ancestry.com had more Canada records. I understand there may not be more to be found. I have searched and searched on every web site and all the Canadian web sites for information on my mother's surname. I find it but with no other family named with it, no way to know who it is. I am having difficulty with the Wards who left New York in 1783 and the Wards who arrived in Nova Scotia in 1783. I suppose it's too much to ask that there is a piece of paper that says Ebenezer Ward b.17??, son of Ebenezer Ward and hannah/anna/anne jones, married Susie smith, dau of john smith and his wife Jane doe. Their children were: Tom, Dick, Harry, Ebenezer, Mary, Jane, Hannah, Anna, Anne, Susie, and Heloise.

As long as ancestry can sell DNA kits at an astonishing rate, the rest of the site is on its own. There isn't a day that something there doesn't work. And I don't know how the Canadian census transcriptions were made but good luck to anyone figuring those out! Beginners will just give up.