As a website owner, I use a lot of tools to assess traffic patterns on my sites, and while doing so recently, I decided that I could use one of them to roughly judge global and U.S. trends for the antiques industry. I wanted to know how the public’s interest in antiques currently stood against historic trends.

Google “owns” web searching globally with an 81% market share that may someday soon become 90% (Yahoo is a distant second at 10% and MSN at 3%).  I reasoned that if any data out there can best capture the public’s interest in a particular topic, it is web search traffic.

My not-so-scientific methodology is not meant to be a precise view of the industry, but it should be an interesting window into the general trends over time.  There are some obvious errors with my methodology such as not having normalized for search traffic increasing overall since 2004 as more people get online.  However, for all I know, Google may have already done that for me within their data.

The charts below shows a relative scale of Google web search activity on a scale of 1-100 from 2004-present.  A datapoint of 100 anywhere in the chart denotes the peak of search interest over the past 5 years.

Let’s analyze each one individually (images can be clicked to expand size).

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