May the fourth be with you!

It's Star Wars day and I imagine that you are curious to know which side has won the battle of the UK web space?

Looking at the trends in our SHINE dataset (.uk websites 1996-2013 collected by Internet Archive) I first looked at the iconic match-up of Luke vs Darth.

Bad news, evil seems to have won this round mainly, it seems, due to the popularity of Darth Vader costume mentions on retail websites.

How about a more general 'Light Side vs Dark side'? 

It appears that discussing the 'dark side' of many aspects in life is a lot more fun and interesting than the 'light side'. 

How about just analysing the phrase 'may the force be with you'?

This phrase doesn't seem to have been particularly popular on the UK web until it started to be used a lot on websites offering downloadable ringtones. Go figure.

Try using the trends feature on this dataset yourself here: www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/graph

Happy stars wars day!

by Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, The British Library

@UKWebArchive