Cthul-Who? 2007 Google Trends
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Scanning through the 2007 Google trends shows that Google searches of Cthulhu held pretty steady throughout last year. Interestingly, as previously expected, Cthulhu did not enjoy a spike in searches due to earlier rumors about the upcoming "Cloverfield" movie containing a Cthulhu-like monstrosity.
Searches for H.P. Lovecraft also held their ground, without a great deal of gain or loss. The two data points which generated more news, though not necessarily further searches, included an article on a walkthrough of Lovecraft's Providence for the 70th anniversary of his death, and the release of a trailer for the Lovecraftian video game "Darkness Within."
Comparing Cthulhu trends with Lovecraft trends produces the graph below, with a few interesting results. It seems googling "Cthulhu" is more popular than looking up Lovecraft himself, but the volume of news references about H.P. Lovecraft is moderately greater than Cthulhu. In this blogger's opinion, a mixture of internet "Cutethulhu" type humor/parodies and Chaosium's popular Call of Cthulhu RPG has propelled HPL's creation to higher interest than himself. Though it's nice to see that in official news, at least, Lovecraft isn't yet eclipsed by his own creation.
-Grim Blogger