Search charts come from Wikimedia's public pageview statistics: how many times an English Wikipedia article was viewed in each calendar year. The bank aggregates monthly data into full years from 2016 onward, which means every search chart is a short series with a big, obvious event in it somewhere.
That is the appeal of the category. Few things look less like a straight line than collective curiosity. A launch, a scandal, a tournament, a death or a viral moment sends a single article's pageviews up like a wall, and the years afterwards are usually a decay back to something ordinary — or a new higher plateau if the subject stayed relevant.
What kinds of charts appear
- Breakout events: a product or game that appeared from nowhere and dominated lookups for a year.
- Tournaments and cycles: events that repeat, producing a spike every few years.
- People in the news: a public figure's pageviews around a specific event and the quieter years after.
- Steady climbs: topics whose readership grew with the internet itself.
How scoring behaves on search charts
Search series are spiky and asymmetric. A spike year is easy to spot before the cut-off; the hard part is what happens after. Does the article decay back to its old level, settle at a new higher level, or keep climbing? Each answer produces a different line, and the game rejects charts where extending the visible trend would have worked.
Another feature: the data starts in 2016, so the visible window can be short. A chart cut off in 2021 might show only five or six years, of which two are the event. Read the axis carefully — a "peak" that looks enormous may only be twice the baseline, while an ordinary-looking rise may be the biggest relative change on the chart.
Drawing advice for search charts
- Identify the event year. If the visible line spikes and then falls, the hidden window is probably a decay.
- Decay is rarely instant. Pageviews usually slide over two to four years rather than falling to baseline in one step.
- If the spike was a global event, expect a permanent baseline lift: people learned the name.
- Do not extend a decay below the pre-spike baseline unless the topic is genuinely forgotten.
- For cyclical events, look for the period: tournaments, elections and award seasons repeat.
A category for 2020s curiosity
Because the pageview record starts in 2016, search charts are inherently about the recent past: the games we played, the products we bought, the events we followed. That makes them the category where a player's cultural knowledge helps most — but also the category where a single famous event can make the answer too easy, which is why the bank and the scheduling keep search to at most one chart per day.
If you want to understand the category quickly, play an archive week of search charts. The shapes repeat: wall, slide, plateau. Once you have seen ten, you will start calling the decay correctly.