First - there was a dip because that's just how markets work. After large rises, a retreat in price is practically guaranteed. Traders want to take profits and buyers want to get a better entry price.
As far as the correlation with search traffic - I imagine that a lot of that is from people who are interested due to the price/payouts. Most of that traffic could just be from people in the crypto world who see the increases and decide to visit the site to see what's happening. As prices rise and fall, so does the user base (at least that has been the trend here so far).
Yes..."free money" is always a great lure. It's unfortunate that there isn't much else to offer right now. I hope that the dev teams at Steemit, Inc. have some bigger plans that they're about to execute. You don't want to miss the influx of interest/hype for a second time.
I partially agree with you, but you are forgetting that even if those people leave Steemit once the lure wares off, they have to do it by powering down. Even if they never invest, registering the account entails STEEM they can't touch immediately in whole, and if I understand it correctly even in part, for two years. I am talking specifically the "free money" in each account. Once would assume that this would keep STEEM more stable than even Bitcoin because of this. Even when STEEM rises due to traders trading it, most would do their due diligence and many would end up singing up for Steemit themselves. Even when WHales power down, they would always have more in than they are able to take out.
This is no longer the case. The hard fork back in December (16, I believe) changed the power down schedule to 13 weeks for completion.
Can I ask, you this then, if you start the power down and then stop it, does it still restart from the beginning or just continue? And I also noticed that Poloniex and a few other exchanges are on the Whale list. Does this mean all of the STEEM they hold is also documented here on steemit?
Poloniex operates a wallet on Steem to facilitate transfers into the exchange. Case in point, if you pull the deposit window on Polo, the sending address for STEEM is poloniex (@poloniex).
There is a sreem wallet that freewallet.org provide on the App Store I must warn people not to use it it does not work properly I can't send my steem any wear it don't let you do smart pay out and you can't access your funds all transactions fail but of course it lets people pay in and send funds to them but it's a scam in my opponion
/me registers @polaniex and @poloneix and such
EDIT: oh lulz guess i wasn't the first with that idea