Linux Distributions Trends

I am sure that by now all the world has already found out and tested the cool new tool google launched yesterday: google trends… It is a very nice tool that allows you to see the searches done by peoples, on any keyword you are interested, have evolved over time. This doesn’t show ’exact’ results, but instead is shows a nice graph with a visual representation of the ’trend’. Another cool feature is that you get also some details about spikes on searches (on the right), and information about the locations of the peoples doing the searches (on the bottom of the page). You can also restrict the trend search by region or only some year or month in time. Very cool.

Still what I have liked most is the possibility to compare the trend of searches between 2 or more keywords. Let’s look for example on a comparison of the searches performed by peoples containing some linux distribution names. This doesn’t result in how many peoples are actually using linux, or those distributions, but the interest of the general public in those names. Here is a real example:

debian redhat fedora centos

What does this show us? That redhat is going down… (not a surprise after the release of their rhel/fedora projects). Debian is strong and many peoples are still interested into it. Fedora took the interest over redhat (rhel as search term is negligible). Centos? Peoples don’t know to much about this cool project.

Here are some more comparisons that looked interesting to me:

debian ubuntu

This shows that the interest for ubuntu has grown constantly lately.

And one more :-)

windows linux

That shows a comparison between windows (still this can be seen as a general term as in doesn’t necessary mean microsoft windows) and linux.

As a conclusion, I have liked very much this tool and its potential is great. Your imagination is the limit. Still regardless of your interesting topics this should be really useful to see what the trend is…