Mining Minecraft · Spurious charts
U.S. Minecraft search interest correlates with bed Wikipedia opens
Two public monthly charts, one silly pairing: Google Trends for “Minecraft” and Wikipedia opens for Bed (r = −0.45 over 134 months). Correlation is not causation. This is furniture curiosity, not a crafting recipe.
Correlation (r)
−0.45
Opposite direction across 134 months. Closer to −1 would mean a perfect mirror.
Charts searched
185
Bed made the shortlist for the joke surface, not because it beat bowling on |r|.
If this were causal (it isn’t)
As Minecraft search interest rose, players set their spawn… in the game. Real-world bed Wikipedia traffic dozed off. Night skipped itself. Mattress stocks… no. That story is the joke. The chart is real. The cause is not.
How bed made the shortlist
After checking 185 outside series, Wikipedia opens for Bed scored as a strong monthly opposite with Minecraft search interest: about −0.45 across 134 shared months from mid-2015 through mid-2026.
In plain words: months when Minecraft search interest ran hotter in this window often lined up with quieter bed Wikipedia traffic, and the other way around. That is a mirror pattern, not a scoreboard of “Minecraft stole sleep.”
Minecraft search interest vs bed Wikipedia opens
Two different thermometers on one timeline. Green is Google’s relative Minecraft score (0–100 in this window). Orange is how many times people opened Wikipedia’s Bed page. Opposite slopes can still look “connected.”
Two thermometers, not one story
Google Trends is a relative interest score for the word “Minecraft” in the United States. 100 means the peak in that Trends window. It is not players online.
Wikipedia opens count how often people loaded the encyclopedia page titled Bed. That is curiosity about beds as furniture and sleep — not beds crafted from wool and planks.
Stack those two public charts and you can get a neat opposite move. Stack enough unrelated charts and you should expect neat moves sometimes. That is the whole lesson.
See also
Month-to-month wiggles are much weaker
If I look at percent change from one month to the next, the link shrinks to about −0.13. The big opposite move is more about long shapes of the two charts than about beds and Minecraft twitching together every month.
That is a useful check. A headline correlation can look fierce while the month-to-month story is mild.
Why publish a fake-looking relationship on purpose
Because the fake-looking part is the point. The Minecraft bed is a perfect punchline — so this leaf is careful to say the Wikipedia series is not the in-game block.
Keep the joke. Keep the receipts. Do not keep the causal story.
How I calculated it
Anchor: Google Trends term “Minecraft,” United States, monthly series I saved (interest above zero). Outside series: Wikimedia monthly pageviews for English Wikipedia Bed (all-access, user). Overlap: 2015-07 through 2026-08 · n = 134. Pearson r = −0.451 · R² = 0.204 · Spearman ρ = −0.449. Month-over-month % change Pearson r = −0.134 (133 pairs). Parent hunt: 185 catalog series (prices, jobs, food, Wikipedia culture pages), then a weirdness pass for the funniest strong matches.
Sources
- Google Trends: term “Minecraft”, United States, monthly extract (as-of 2026-08-08).
- Wikimedia Pageviews API: English Wikipedia article Bed, monthly, all-access, user.
- Parent weird-chart hunt: 185 public monthly/annual series ranked against the same Minecraft Trends anchor (this run).
- Inspired by the public lesson in Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations (his charts are CC BY 4.0; this leaf uses primary Trends and Wikipedia data).
