PDF is catching up, but clearly has a long way to go. Just how popular is PDF compared to, say, "YouTube", which is the most popular search-term Googled worldwide. ![]() Google recalculates all the time, so your exact results may vary. (source: Google Trends)Īs of Octoworldwide searches for PDF peaked in March, 2022. March 2022 was the latest "peak pdf” worldwide. Users may be reading, banking, signing and commenting online using other technologies, but the world’s chosen general-purpose document format continues increasing relative to all searches. So, let’s check in to see how PDF is faring in internet searches since 2018. What follows is a series of screen-shots, as Google Trends does not (yet) facilitate sharing a snapshot of a given search (PDF would work well for that :-). These searches were conducted on October 28, 2022, four years to the day since my previous article on this subject. PDF complements web technology it does not compete with it. PDF is key to digital transformation precisely because a self-contained, reliable and capable portable document format does what other web technologies do not. Although web pages can serve “document-like” functions in many ways in practice it's "pdf" that comes to user's minds. Almost 30 years since the PDF format launched in 1993 PDF applications and usage continue to grow the ecosystem becomes larger and more vibrant each year. Web pages are more dynamic than ever before, but they are no more “documents” than they were in 2018. except, perhaps as a place from which to download the pdf that they seek. Of course, 99.9% of those searching for “pdf” have no interest in the format itself we can infer from their inclusion of “pdf” in a search that they are looking for something related to a publication, form or document. It's a reasonable conjecture that when users add "pdf" to their search it means that they are not thinking about an HTML web page. When we look at the overall trend it's clear although the curve is flattening pdf is more popular worldwide in 2022 than in 2018. ![]() and at the scale in question, it's at least interesting to consider, not least because, absent China and Russia, we’re really looking at almost all internet searches conducted worldwide. As of my check on October 28, 2022, however, peak pdf was in March of 2022.Īttempting to understand how people think of a given idea by way of search engine statistics might be limited and/or fraught, but it also has the very great advantage of being free and easy to the end-user. As of October 2018 peak pdf had come in September, 2015. Results are recalculated over time, so you may not get precisely identical results.įour years ago I looked at "peak pdf” - the moment when interest - however tangential - in the portable document format seemed highest. Google Trends reports on the frequency and a few other characteristics of given search term usage relative to all searches happening on Google (more about how Google Trends works).
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