What do people call our industry?

For those that don’t know, Google recently released a tool called Google Trends (trends.google.com). Essentially, this tool allows anyone to gauge the relative popularity of various search terms. You can also filter your results by geography and chronology. We’ve begun using this tool as part of our keyword research for search engine optimization. Essentially, websites should be optimized around relevant terms that are used most often by searchers. Today, I thought of another interesting use for this tool. For years, I’ve heard discussions about what our industry should be called. Are we continuing education, lifelong learning, adult education, or university extension programs? Perhaps more importantly, how does the general public (here represented as Google searchers) think of our industry? Google trends can help answer this question. Note that I filtered the results to show only searches in the United States during the last twelve months. Here were the dramatic results of my inquiry: Lifelong learning was the least popular of the four search terms University extension was used in searches 3.8 times as often as lifelong learning Adult education was used 11.4 times as often as lifelong learning Finally, Continuing education was the most popular of the four terms. It was used in searches 19.2 times as often as lifelong learning and 1.68 times as often as adult education. I’d love to hear about ways that other people have found to use the Google Trends feature!