You know what happened &quot;shortly before&quot; Snowden&#x27;s leaks, two terrorists killed 3 people and injured hundreds others in a terrorist attack in Boston.  Is that a good time to establish a baseline for number of page views?<p>I&#x27;m not saying there isn&#x27;t a chilling effect, just that I am highly skeptical of this measurement of it.  Wikipedia pages on these subjects are practically news articles.  They are going to be pretty highly linked with whatever is going on in the world at the time.  Considering that, I would fully expect terrorism searches to be high after a recent terrorist attack and to drop as terms like &quot;Al Queda&quot; become less newsworthy on a global scale.