I think this just reflects how few people are part of the Valley culture. Outside of the Valley and people strongly affected by its culture, they're not called "startups" — they're called "businesses." The phrase I would guess most people would use to search for information on the topic is "start my own business." I don't think anyone I know would say "start a startup."
There is a big difference between a business and a startup. And at this point most people trying to start a startup would know the term. So I think the explanation is simply that "start a startup" is not the kind of phrase people would type into Google.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=startup <-- Kinda interesting.
That said, whatever you are using to determine that "the total number of people searching for information on starting new businesses is... a couple hundred per week" is very very very far off the mark.
Here's a list of some related US searches in the adwords tool: http://skitch.com/webwright/dxyg5/google-adwords-keyword-too...
I'm sure that's true so some extent, but I'd bet the vast majority of 'home business' searches are people doing lead gen, e.g. 'home business' + 'palo alto'.
Re:How to Start a Startup (2005)
by ivankirigin on Saturday July 31, 2010 @05:42PM
(#1564291)
Also interesting, showing a different trend:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=bootstrapping
http://www.google.com/trends?q=AB+test
What is even more interesting is the countries and cities the searches are coming from. A lot of Asia as far as countries go but the top cities are in the US
Maybe "start a startup" is just not a popular phrase. I'd guess people are more likely to search for "startup", "start a company", "start a business".
"entrepreneur" seems to be on the rise
http://www.google.com/trends?q=entrepreneur
(although "entrepreneurship" is declining...)
I think it's interesting because
* The number of people looking to learn about starting businesses seems to be flat or even slightly declining, at least if search traffic is any indicator.
* Based on what I can extrapolate from my analytics and well as my experience playing around with Google / FB ads, it seems like the total number of people searching for information on starting new businesses is on the order of a a couple hundred per week. This is pretty disturbing for a nation of 300M people.
I'm not sure how much validity there is to this, but I've always been a little disturbed whenever I've done things like, say, comparing the number of parenting books sold on Amazon to the number of children born each year.