I was checking a while back if people are actually searching for mobile phone antivirus software online. Using Google Trends you can get a good picture as to what’s happening.

As you can see we have a growth since 2004 and then from late 2010 we can see a decline in people searching for the phrase “mobile antivirus”. In November 2011 we see a small spike in search traffic because of a virus outbreak in China which affected 1 million users and then the trend went down again.

Now this got me thinking if everybody is using mobile/cell phones why am I seeing this trend.

Have we changed the way we search, the iPhone was released in 2007 and as you can see from the graph below the trend is upward.

We have a few peaks which I’m putting down to seasonal and maybe the release of new versions and new IOS updates. But, overall an upward trend as you would expect with a new product and considering the amount of units sold.

The first phone sold with the Android OS was in October 2008 and we can see from Google trends that people started searching for antivirus software in the middle of 2009 (July). We can see a couple of peaks at Christmas and marked with the letter A is a news report when Norton released Android antivirus software.

What is really interesting is maybe people have changed how they search and are not using “Mobile Antivirus” as much and are rather using iPhone and Android instead. If you search for “Smartphone Antivirus” we can also see this trend rising from just after 2009.

How people search and how products can change this whole behavior is really interesting. Articles like The Engines of Change give a real insight into what changes we are seeing in customer behavior when online. And we can see from the graphs above one way this may be happening.

No matter what niche/market you’re in you should spend a little time on Google Trends and see if you can spot anything interesting.