Ed Greshko wrote:
The folks at Red Hat may want to take a look at
http://www.google.com/trends.
Entering "red hat, suse, fedora, debian" produces results that may be of
interest to them
OK, so now do a search on:
"red hat"|"red hat enterprise linux"|redhat|rhel|"fedora
core"|fc4|fc5,debian,suse,centos,ubuntu
Totally skews things towards Red Hat, making it appear to be much more
searched than the others. But that still does not mean anything without
a LOT more data.
Remember the old saw... There are three types of lies:
1) Lies
2) Damned Lies
3) Statistics
Maybe the volume of Google searches on Red Hat's technologies are going
down because the documentation at redhat.com and fedoraproject.org is so
good that people don't need to go back to Google once they've found it.
Maybe the search volume is going down because Red Hat is dying on the
vine (not likely if you've been following their numbers recently). Or
it could be that people aren't using search terms containing the text
strings "red hat" or similar because they're searching on more specific
terms like "rd-bomb: segfault at 0000002a95692000 rip 0000000000403023
rsp 0000007fbfffed70 error 6."
I personally suspect that since people usually search on topics with
which they are not familiar, it is a good sign that Red Hat is not being
searched on as much. It just means that people aren't searching for
info on Red Hat because they already know about it. But that's just my
opinion - it's not based on any significant facts.
There are any number of reasons why you could see the trend you are
seeing. Without a lot more data, I don't see anything really alarming.
Thomas
