I had previously answered questions about which is the best cordless power tool brand and which is the best cordless power tool brand for DIYers. This week, I wondered, which is most popular?
It started with a question posed to a renovation team at Ikea whose cart had both Dewalt and Milwaukee cordless drills and other tools. I’ll talk about their response another time. After that, I revisited Google Trends, a tool that allows you to compare search engine activity trends for different keywords and search parameters.
It has been a while since we looked to see the latest Google search trends, and I thought maybe a fresh comparison of Google search results can show us which brands are most searched-for these days. (You can thank Benjamen for putting the idea in my head today.)
A few keywords and some rearrangement to line up the default colors nicely, and we can see that Dewalt 20V has resulted in more search engine activity than Milwaukee M18.
Interesting.
Search Terms
- Bosch 18V
- Milwaukee M18
- Dewalt 20V
- Makita 18V
- Porter Cable 20V
What the chart shows is the relative search engine activity related to the search terms.
What the chart shows is that in the United States, “Dewalt 20V” has a slight lead on “Milwaukee M18.” There’s one meeting point for the terms, taking place in the second week of March 2019, and another time when they come close last August.
Update: As a reminder, don’t take the chart at face value. What it shows is the popularity of the search terms, and other search activity related to these specific terms.
“Makita 18V” is in very distant third place, followed by “Porter Cable 20V,” and then finally “Bosch 18V.”
One thing to remember is that the data comparison only looks at the specific search terms. If you change “Milwaukee M18” to “M18,” the Milwaukee search activity rises above Dewalt 20V search activity. But if you search for “Dewalt,” there’s such a large gap in search activity that everything besides M18 or Milwaukee M18 is a flat line with a 1% or less share of the search activity.
If you just search for “Makita,” it then jumps above “M18” and even “Dewalt 20V.”
I thought that “Brand 18V/20V” was a good way to create an apples-to-apples comparison, although there are still lots of uncertainties, unknowns, and potential errors to how the data is compiled.
Unfortunately, you can’t draw any solid conclusions from the data presented by Google Trends. Well, you can try, but I don’t think you could do so confidently. One would have to look at multiple levels of comparisons and basically sum up a lot of independent search terms with low overlap.
In other words, the data shows that “Dewalt 20V” is a more popular search term than “Milwaukee M18,” and “Makita 18V” is the focus of more search queries than “Bosch 18V” or “Porter Cable 20V.”
You could say that it appears Dewalt is a more popular cordless power tool brand than Milwaukee, but not with high certainty.
More Info(via Google Trends Query)
More Info(Modified Query with Quoted Search Terms)
Google Trends can be fun to play around with. For example, it seems that “Dewalt 18V” and “Milwaukee M12” are more popular search terms than “Makita 18V.”
Or, “M18 Fuel” vs. “FlexVolt.”
Worldwide, Makita is a more popular search term than Dewalt.
If you change the terms to “Brand cordless,” than the 5 brands still stack together with Dewalt on top, then Milwaukee, Makita, Bosch, and Porter Cable.
If you look at “M18” vs. “20V,” you’ll see slightly different trends.
It’s difficult to know how to interpret the data. For example, “cordless drill” vs. “impact driver,” will show the latter being a more popular search term, but that might not fairly represent the popularity of drills to impact drivers. “Dewalt drill” vs. “Dewalt impact driver,” might be easier or at least fairer to draw conclusions from.
