In the online world, one measure people use to chart the rise of an emerging technology is Google’s Internet search engine. By tracking the number of hits retrieved when a phrase or word is entered, you get an idea of how popular a topic is, and how interest in that idea is growing.
According to Wikipedia‘s “History of Podcasting” entry, the number of Google search hits for the term “podcasting” climbed as follows:
- September 28, 2004 – Blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many “hits” Google found for the word “podcasts”. His first query reportedly returned 24 results.[28]
- September 28, 2004 – Google Trends marks the beginning of searches for ‘podcast’ at the end of September.[29]
- October 1, 2004 – There were 2,750 hits on Google’s search engine for the word “podcasts”. This number continued to double every few days.
- October 18, 2004 – The number of hits on Google’s search engine for the word “podcasts” surpassed 100,000. See September 28, 2005.
- September 28, 2005 – Exactly a year after first tracking hits for the word “podcasts” on Google’s search engine, Google found more than 100,000,000 hits on the word “podcasts.”
