With more and more people cutting their landline phones, you’d expect that searches on Google for landline would decrease in the past 12 years. Google searches for landline are actually increasing, because there are more people who don’t know what a landline is.
Mentions of the word landline in books were pretty consistent starting in the 1940s through the 1980s. Then in the 1990s the term gets really busy, appearing 5.5 times MORE. What’s up with that?
In the late 1990s, the mobile phone became more commonplace in people’s hands. We needed a term to distinguish our landline phones with our mobile phones.
Use of mobile phone blows landline out of the water! Which sorta makes sense. In a book, how many times are people going to say “landline”? Instead people often say “home phone”.
Home phone predates landline by about 20 years. In the year 2006, landline crossed over and is mentioned more frequently than home phone.
Just now, Google searches for landline are finally catching up to searches for home phone.
Back to the original theory that more people are searching for landline, because there are more people who don’t know what a landline is. Let’s compare the searches for landline vs mobile phone.
Certainly enough, there are less people searching for mobile phone over time. People know what a mobile phone is!
I cut my landline in 2007, and never looked back!