TikZ versus PSTricks Google trends

For some time now I’ve had the feeling that TikZ is gaining popularity. In newsgroups and forums there is an increasing number of TikZ related questions and more and more TikZ related resources are available on the web. It is difficult to measure popularity. A tool that can give an indication is Google trends:

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

As a former PSTricks user I was curious to find out how the search term tikz compares to pstricks. I fed the terms through Google trends and got this interesting graph:

PSTricks has been around a lot longer than TikZ. The first version of PGF was released in 2003. In late 2005 the TikZ frontend layer was added. Interestingly the search term tikz does not gain enough volume to appear in the statistics until early 2007. To get a more correct picture I included pgf in the search term. PGF has several meanings so I had to include the tex latex search terms as well:

Again TikZ and PGF gain enough momentum in early 2007. Interestingly this is a couple of months after the TikZ and PGF examples gallery went online.

The Google trend is not an accurate measure of popularity, but they indicate that the popularity of TikZ is steadily increasing. A detailed view of the 2008 statistics looks very promising:

I’ll finish this unscientific study with a comparison of TikZ, PSTricks and Metapost: