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IBM i, iSeries, AS/400, System i—What Do You Search For?

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Bill Langston

If you use Google to search for information related to IBM i, what terms and product names do you enter?  IBM i, iSeries, System i, AS/400?  Google's own search statistics indicate pretty clearly that many people still use them all.  As software vendors, we must know what words and phrases people search on because we want our own information and search advertising to appear frequently. NGS uses Google's Adwords tools each month to get a quantifiable measure of market interest and what people in the "Americas" search on when they look for things related to IBM i. It's a little tricky to get accurate numbers because of multi-word product names, special characters like "/", etc., but here's what Google's Adwords tool shows for the average number of searches per month for the past year ending June 2015:

It's amazing how AS/400 and all its variants continue to dominate the market even after all these years since IBM marketed a product by that name. We support and use IBM's current naming conventions consistently in our conversations and materials, but sometimes we're forced to use older terminology to ensure our Google ads and website come up frequently in search results.

For comparison sake, Google shows that "business intelligence" was entered an average of 33,100 times in May and June. LINUX was used 201,000 times both months. "IBM Watson" was searched on 22,200 times in May and 18,100 time in June.

Caveat: Google search stats may be misleading in technical fields because experienced IBM i developers know where to go directly for technical information and are not as likely as consumers to start out at Google, but the managers and users they support may indeed begin their research at Google when they have questions.

Here's more information on how Google arrives at these statistics.

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