Editor’s Note: Counterterrorism officials often express considerable concern about lone wolf terrorists -- individuals who act without direct ties to an existing group -- because they are difficult to detect and stop. Yet while such individuals can conduct bloody attacks, does the violence help the cause the terrorists purpose to champion? Marc Meyer, a student at Georgetown University, examines search trends and finds that while there is usually an initial spike after the violence, in the long-term, such attacks do not appear to generate more interest in the attacker’s ideology.

While the reasons behind mass shootings across the United States are varied, these events are sometimes driven by a mass shooter’s desire to bring attention to a cause or an idea, and as a result, to change the conversations, beliefs, or policy decisions of Americans. But how effective are mass shootings for executing this strategy? National web search trends of topics associated with the ideologies espoused by shooters show no significant changes in search traffic over an extended period, suggesting that mass shootings in the United States are not an effective terrorism tactic in so far as the goal is to spread the shooter’s ideology.

Three recent mass killings---the 2009 Foot Hood shooting, the 2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, and this year’s Charleston church shooting---each demonstrate this conclusion. While each shooter had an ideological goal, their motives, targets, and locations, all varied. Even so, the media coverage and each shootings' long-term political salience, as demonstrated by web search trends, was similarly short.

Recent studies have shown that web searches are useful “for detecting people’s information needs.” Analyzing these web trends can offer valuable insight into public opinion of Internet users. A lack of search traffic, especially after a large-scale event, is a leading indicator of a lack of general interest in a topic.

The search term categories chosen for this project represent the predominant themes of each shooter’s ideology, such as Dylan Roof’s white supremacy memo, or they come from prior statements and news reports about the shootings. US search data pulled from Google’s “Trends” tool shows the volume of search traffic from a three-year period surrounding the event, two years prior and one year after. The data represents the weekly standard deviations from the previous two-year’s norm. As a point of comparison, the same evaluation method was used to analyze the Snowden leaks. The Snowden leaks provide a valuable comparison as an event with significant, continuing impact. This data demonstrates that recent mass shootings did not have a long-term effect on the national conversation. To the extent they had an impact at all, it was relatively short-lived, typically only lasting a little over a month.