Google Insights is a funny tool showing you how many search search requests have be done for the specified keywords during the last years. Of course sometimes it is not really a trend which can be seen but simply a replacement of names or concepts, but nevertheless sometimes you can get also some interesting insights.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked during an interview if proprietary vendors of data mining solutions like SAS or SPSS already notice a drop in sales due to the pressure caused by the low license costs offered by our open source solutions.

Well, I can of course not really answer this but at least I find it interesting enough to simply compare awareness and market perception for RapidMiner as open source solution compared to, let's say, SAS Enterprise Miner. And that's exactly what I did:

No question that those trends are neither accurate nor representative but hey, there seems to be at least some movement in the market. Those are exciting times and I am eager to see how the IT world is changing during the next years.