If you have five minutes to kill, it’s fun to search on various phrases at the Google Trends site. Buzzwords like “cloud computing” have trackable data, but most graphics terms don’t have enough traffic to be worth recording. Here are some examples of graphics-related terms that have sufficient hit-counts:

• Ray Tracing – I like how Google Trends points out relevant articles for various spikes.
• SSAO – some definite spikes there, and what’s with all the traffic from Brazil? Is this the end of some word in Portugese? But there aren’t really hits before 2007, so I guess it’s real…
• Collision detection, SIGGRAPH, and computer graphics – is interest in these areas waning, or are they simply established and not newsworthy? But then, GPU is going up.
• Companies and products are fun to try: Larrabee, NVIDIA, Crytek.
• You can also compare various terms. Here’s “DirectX programming, OpenGL programming, iPhone programming“. Pretty easy to guess which one is going up. Surprisingly un-spikey for DirectX and OpenGL.
• And of course, Real-Time Rendering – Various random spikes; South Korea loves us.