Yesterday I did a post about using the Distrowatch rankings to measure the popularity of various distros. Today I’m going to use another tool, Google Trends.

It’s interesting to compare the interest over time in various software development methodologies and practices. Google Trends is a great tool for this, although it’s not without limitations, especially since so many programming terms have other meanings. For instance, you can use it to visually show how interest in eXtreme programming has (sadly) been waning for many years now:

Google trends is a cunning tool; one that can be used to show the query frequency of various keywords. Most people misuse it by comparing "Linux" and "Vista" in an attempt to show how one is better than the other - a comparison that's as foolish as it is inaccurate. So I'm putting my thoughts down and applying them to some Google trends searches and here is what I've found.

I have been under the impression that GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software have been gaining popularity, especially within the last couple years. One trip to Google Trends proved me wrong.

The above graph shows the OS stats for W3C since March, 2003. Side-stepping the debate over whether the stats are an accurate representation of the OS share, I'd like to look at the trends.

Having written about a few methods of measuring popularity, including Torrents, Google Trends and Distrowatch Rankings I felt that I could try and draw some conclusions from all the data collected.

I don't know if that is a good news or bad news, but Ubuntu is going to be more popular than Linux itself according to some statistics via Google Trends and Google Insight.

With Sun, said Zander, Oracle's getting a struggling hardware company that's losing market share.

Google has pissed off some powerful people of late, but none so much as the CEO of Apple. Jobs is unhappy about the Nexus One and gunning for Google. Could Google live to regret the day it decided to go into the phone business?