Every second blog I came across recently has an entry about google trends, so I am adding my small findings too! 😉

After playing with it for a few hours, I have to say that writing a relevant query is not always as easy as it seems. People are posting Java vs Python vs Ruby comparisons, but they are not always aware that the graph contains (among other things) the comparison of an island, a comedy troupe (Monty Python) and a character set (Ruby Characters), for example. According to wikipedia, all three terms have more than ten possible meanings, and although a tech nerd may know only one for each of them, not all pages out there are (fortunately) written by tech guys.

Let’s start with some Rails related stuff:

Well, I wonder who else recently (not even necessarily in the computer industry) got so famous in a matter of days…
It is interesting that there is no data available for “David Heinemeier Hansson” or even “David Hansson”, just for DHH.

The next graph could answer the question whether it is a good idea for a web hosting company today to support Ruby on Rails:

For the idea of the following googleTrendFight thanks for Laszlo on Rails blog.

It’s really thrilling to see that a (once) small open source community can compete with enterprise stuff of such magnitude as JBoss/EJB (ok, this is kind of apples-to-oranges, but nevertheless interesting). If you wonder why did JBoss’ search volume go dramatically up – it’s because RedHat bought the company.

Non-Rails related:
slashdot.com vs digg.com vs reddit.com:

No comment…

The last one about wikipedia, kind of funny:

Why should be this funy? Because the only point in the history (so far) when search volume for wikipedia was declining was because of:

Probably (hopefully?!?!) there is no direct link between these facts, but it is an interesting random coincidence then…

I wonder whether google will improve the quality of this search and/or add possibility to specify advanced queries to prevent mixing in of irrelevant results – at the moment, if I did try to narrow the search, in lot of cases i got back ‘data not available’… Interesting toy, though.