Here's some interesting results.
So, you can see from the trend for "Pathfinder RPG" where the playtest started in March 2008, and the huge spike in August 2009 when the core rules were released. That's also the month where the first measurable results for "Golarion" start coming in.
Now, here's the interesting thing: While "Pathfinder RPG" has the expected region distribution (almost all results are coming from the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the UK), "Golarion" is different.
For "Golarion," search volume from Italy dwarfs the United States, and no other countries are even on the ranking.
If you break it down by region, you see that the Italian results are coming from the regions of Lazio and Lombardy—Rome and Milan, respectively—and there is a strange pattern in the data.
In November 2013, there is a large volume coming from Milan. This disappears the following month, and the month after that a spike appears in Rome, where the interest is high from January to May, though with a noticeable dip during the month of March (this dip also shows up in the country-wide results).
Then the interest in Rome disappears, and interest in Milan reappears, beginning in May and continuing through June and July. It vanishes in August (and does not reappear in Milan, yet the country-wide interest goes up compared to July).
It almost seems like the majority of Google searches for "Golarion" in Italy are made by just one Milanese guy with a summer house in Rome.
Now, on the whole for Italy, interest in Golarion appears in March 2012 and holds steady for the rest of the year. Then it begins swinging up and down, but overall trending upward, with this month—only a quarter of the way in—already forecasted to have the largest volume yet.
And oddly, overall country-wide interest for "Golarion" remained steady from December 2013 to January 2014, even though when broken down by subregion or city the December searches appear to be the work of angry Japanese ghosts trying to escape from an .mp4 of Pulse.
And interest in "Pathfinder RPG" in Italy is 0, and always has been. Maybe it's called something different over there?
I find it bizarre that Google is saying there are more searches for "Golarion" coming from Italy than the United States. In fact, "Golarion" searches in the United States have such a low volume that the geographic data can only tell me that all the searches are coming from California and Texas—also known as the two most populated states in the country. Illinois and Washington state aren't even a blip.
I'm pretty sure there's a poster here who's from Italy.
Could he be the one?
I suspect that "Golarion", besides being the name of the world Pathfinder takes places in, is also by coincidence an Italian word for something. Likely it's unrelated to PF at all.
Or perhaps "Golarion" is what the Italian translation of the game is called?
Nope and nope.
At first I tought that it was because in 2013 there was the first PFS event here, but that was in 2012.
I really have no idea. :/
