A recent post on Pingdom looked at what Google Trends has to say about Linux distributions, Linux, KDE, and other similar keywords. Although Google Trends, which lets you compare how many searches various terms are getting in Google, has the potential to reveal many interesting trends, it is not clear that the results are an accurate representation of interest in a particular subject. Words that have multiple meanings, for instance, will not be accuratly represented in Google Trends. This, however, is rarely a problem for Linux-related terms, due to the uniqueness of most names.

Apart from these confusions, however, how accurate is Google Trends as a measure of interest? Well, it depends on what you mean by interest. Because Trends is based on total searches, it is basically impossible to distinguish between a few people who do a lot of searching or a lot of people who do a little searching. While this might make it a bad option for deciding which product is more popular and similar comparisons, it does not make it bad for everything. Google Trends is very useful for discovering which term is used more. For example, a comparison of Ubuntu and Linux shows that Linux has gone down while Ubuntu has gone up, indicating that the trend (no pun intended) is for people to talk about individual distributions, not Linux as a whole.

In summary, while Google Trends may not be perfect, it is very useful for comparing trends in how people refer to various things, particularly if the phrases are unique.

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