How to follow trends in data analytics (free resources)

A field in technology such as data analytics moves quickly. Tools come and go. Methodologies are hyped and scrapped. How do you keep up with changes in the industry?

In this post I’ll show you some free tools you can you to search for trends in analytics. Let’s use each to compare the interest in Tableau and Power BI (a question I get all the time, by the way!). Each of the below screenshots or embeds were pulled at around the time of this article’s writing in late July 2022.

Google Trends

This is probably the first place to start if you are looking to analyze trends: it lets you compare the relative interest in search terms and topics across Google’s search engine since 2004.

Google Trends is the most complex of the tools listed here, so to make the most of it I suggest this tutorial. In particular, make sure you are aware of the distinction between topics and trends.

Here are the global results in Google Trends for Power BI vs Tableau since 2004 (Tableau was released in 2003 and Power BI in 2015):

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Google Trends is one of my favorite tools to play around with on the web. What interesting patterns in analytics can you find there? Let me know in the comments.

One of my only gripes with Trends is that it’s not really sure what exactly the Y-axis is measuring; it’s a metric for search interest scaled between 0 and 100, rather than some concrete figure. But it’s still such a comprehensive source for viewing the popularity of technology tools and processes over time.

Google Ngram Viewer

While Google Trends shows you trends based on search engine traffic, the Ngram Viewer shows you the interest based on printed sources.

If you thought Google Trends going back to 2004 was pretty cool, the Ngram Viewer lets you see trends over 200 years in the making! It does this by digitizing printed materials (a controversial practice, mind you) and returning what percent of that entire corpus is your designated search term (so it’s clear what the Y-axis is measuring).

One thing that Google Trends does and the Ngram Viewer doesn’t do is add context to the search terms. For example, we can search for Tableau vs Power BI in the Ngram Viewer, but we’re going to get every occurrence of the term “Tableau,” not just those having to do with the data visualization software. The term “Power BI” doesn’t show up in different contexts like that.

So, this might not be the best example for the Ngram Viewer, but it’s still pretty cool. Share any searches you found illuminating in the comments!

StackOverflow Trends

Unlike the last two sources, StackOverflow Trends is specifically for technology trends. It’s a simple concept: you search for a given tag and are given a chart of what percent of StackOverflow questions included that tag for each month.

While it’s nice that we know each of these tags were used in a technology context (because it’s a tech-specific site), sometimes the tags themselves are a little confusing. This is especially the case for data analytics tools, which sit on the periphery of StackOverflow (typically used more by software engineers or possibly data scientists).

With that said here’s a comparison of the powerbi vs tableau-api tags on StackOverflow. It tells a similar, if more aggressive story than that of Google Trends (Perhaps because the Tableau tag is specifically about the API?).

Yandex

Yandex is the “Google of Russia” and provides some basic search word trends. An account is required to retrieve them, although to be honest unless you are particularly interested in trends among the Russian market particularly I’m not sure what you’ll get here that you couldn’t find from these other tools.

Here are the trends for Power BI and Tableau: note that they only go back for the last year and you can only search for one trend at a time, so it’s pretty hard to make much from these.

And here’s Tableau:

Wechat search trends

Finally, the Chinese search engine Wechat also has some trend search functionality. However, to access a Chinese phone number is required. That’s really all I know about this one; it was hard to find much information in English. But if you can get in here and pull the data, let us know what you think!

Past performance, &c

Whether you’re a new analyst figuring out what tools you should learn to look good on the job market, or a business owner deciding what services to provide, keeping a finger on the pulse of the analytics industry is so important. These tools will let you monitor what’s hot, and what’s fading.

Let’s temper this, though… as an analyst, you should know that “past performance is not indicative of future results,” and just because a tool is lagging against its competitors doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place in the analytics landscape.

How has following trends helped you in your analytics career? What resources did you use to do it? Do you have any interesting findings from the tools suggested above you’d like to share? Let’s discuss in the comments.