Search Engines Prove People Are Not Ready to Have Children due to the Crisis
by
on December 25, 2008,
I really would not want to talk about this sad topic today as it is the day when Christ was born yet the world financial crisis seems to be difficult to avoid - holidays or not. The thing is that according to statistics of Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, the crisis has impacted many fields, including people’s ideas and plans about having children.
It turns out that now that people are losing their jobs or are expecting to be laid off any time in the near future, they seem to think that they can not afford having a child - and desperately search for information about abortions using Yandex. The trend is a devastating one to me: only in the month of November Yandex users searched for “abortion” more than 800 thousand of times which is terrible compared to 1,100 thousand of searches during the entire 2007.
Some of you may know that Russia is not such an easy country to live in as we seem to have at least some kind of a crisis here almost always. But since the early 2000s we have seemed to have some stability with people having good-paying jobs more often than not and thinking about the future with at least some certainty. As a result of this stability people finally learned to plan for the future and began to use loans to buy new cars or homes. And this very stability has also been reflected in how people started to think about family: we have noticed the birth rate in the country growing rapidly.
But unfortunately the stability did not last and Russia has been hit by the world financial crisis heavily: people are laid off, have their salaries cut significantly or are sent to unpaid vacations for months. And despite of all the promises our government makes not to let people begin to panic, the panic seems to be here already anyway and people are certainly not ready to plan large-scale expenses now that they are not sure if they will have their jobs in the next few months at all. Unfortunately, a child is also considered a large-scale expense here - hence the stats of the local search engine.
Of course this information looks too amazing to be true and some of the Russian bloggers quickly noticed that the difference is too high claiming that the number of people searching for the term is artificially increased for SEO purposes. And while I tend to agree that this may be true to a certain extent, I still decided to check what Google has to say about it and did a quick search on Insights for Search to see if there are similar trends in the US as well.
And in fact, there is a very significant rise in the “abortion” searches among the US users as well in the early November. But I hope that here many of the searches were related to people trying to find out what the presidential candidates thought about abortion as this is a very sensitive issue that often influences how people will vote at least to a certain extent.
But it is still visible that people are searching for the information on this sensitive topics more frequently than they did when they had normal lives, at least to revenue sources in a family and some savings to rely on. And the trend is disturbing as we will certainly see the number of people actually planning a pregnancy and having a child declining - at least until there is some stability in this world again. Of course it is no surprise that search engines reflect in their stats what real people are concerned about in the real world - and too bad the crisis influences what we search for in this manner. Sure, for some people the crisis is very difficult but it is even worse that for many people the crisis will mean they won’t be born at all.
