While researching other subjects, I decided to search Google Trends for “homelab” to see the relative popularity for this search keyword over time.
What I found is pretty interesting:
According to Google Trends, the search word “homelab” has never been more popular than it is right now.
There are also a good deal of breakout searches happening in the periphery:
What an interesting time to be involved in building and running servers in the home!
Homelabs have been around a long time, I have been doing it for 25 years, but we never really called it Home Labbing back then. For a long time, the community was fragmented into silos: the “Self-Hosters” (privacy/cloud-replacement), the “Data Hoarders” (massive NAS builds), and the “IT Pros” (certification prep).
Now “Homelab” has become the definitive umbrella term. People who used to search for “home server setup” or “build a NAS” are now just searching for “homelab.”
I think the Enshittification of so many online services has more people looking at ways to self host things which leads them right into the “Home Lab” community. It’s a welcome trend to see more people getting into this.
