hmm, is it all losing steam - Jason Stajich

Lincoln Stein's prediction is coming true :) http://www.oreillynet.com/pub... - Neil Saunders

check the top country, India, and the longest bar is bioinformatics -- haven't searched the matter, but is there outsourcing of bioinformatics application coding there like with the other types of software ? - Ntino

They changed the scaling algorithms in the new version right ? I cant seam to make a query that results in an upward trend. Maybe buggy ? Alternative .. a lot more people getting online and therefore reducing the relative number of science related queries (its a relative measure). Or just even pople doing a lot more queries in general, most of them just to find a website, etc - Pedro Beltrao

Agree with Stein's writing... it's a tool, even though to do, but will become a field generated by the next stage in the evolution of the biology field... cause biology is becoming more and more data intensive. Do you think in 2012, anybody will be going to the lab to do cultures on Petri dishes and observe colonies changing colors (sorry wet lab people in the room). Sure there'll be labs, but Core labs with the data spitting instruments, like array scanners, sequencers, auto-protein gel scanners etc. - Ntino

... to continue the rambling: all data out of those machines sucked into computers (well we hope for e-lab notebooks, or better for the data in the open) and then that 's where the discovery will be... that's how I see the future of biology, which is currently happening, turning into a data-intensive discipline. - Ntino

Note that the news volume (bottom chart) has actually increased. The search stats tend to be a bit weird (except for very popular search terms, which bioinformatics is not), so I wouldn't use that information for investment advice :-) - Eric Jain

I sense debate brewing :) I think there will always be a place for people looking at things in labs. I like bioinformatics but I don't think it ever has been, is, or will be a field. The sole reason for bioinformatics journals is to give academic bioinformaticians a place to publish: because that's the sole output recognised by academia. Academia doesn't know how to employ tool-builders, or recognise their skills. - Neil Saunders

One reason "bioinformatics" collapsed as an industry was for some of the same reasons listed above. It was never an industry by itself, just got subsumed by the broader scientific process (by and large) - Deepak Singh

To blame: Leona Lewis? http://is.gd/wAp ; ) - Matt Wood

To be honest, that was a joke: but what's going on towards the end of 2006? A big spike for Leona and a big corresponding dip in science searches! She _is_ to blame! - Matt Wood

:) I blame twitter, same observation. - Neil Saunders

Matt ... lol :) - Deepak Singh