The Trends

Every once in a while we troll through Google’s amazing trend service to see what people are thinking about various topics. Of course, we investigated 3D printing.

What’s Google’s amazing trend service, you ask? It’s a leverage of their colossal record of search requests. Just as you can search for a term, you can use Google Trends to determine the frequency of search for specified terms over the course of time. You’ll see a friendly colored line bounce up and down over time as search queries were made. The trick is that people tend to search only for things they have an interest in knowing about. In other words, Google Trends has an indirect ability to show us what’s going on in everyone’s heads.

We tried searching for various combinations of terms, but many had so few searches that little data resulted. For example, “3D Print” and “Rapid manufacturing” had no measurable hits. However, by searching for “3D Printer”, “3D Printing” and “Rapid Prototyping”, we discovered an interesting trend.

It appears that interest in Rapid Prototyping is decreasing! 3D Printing is somewhat stable, but has now met the frequency of searches for “Rapid Prototyping”.

What does this mean? We believe that 3D printing is still firmly in the emerging tech category, at least in the minds of the general public. We need something like an O’Reilly book or an inexpensive personal printer. We suspect those things may be coming.

Via Google Trends