[OT] Google Trends

[Don Russell]

Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 20:19 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 19:42, 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.
>>>
>>>       
>> Or for more optimistic trends, try ubuntu or centos...
>>
>> -- 
>>   Les Mikesell
>>     lesmikesell at gmail.com
>>
>>     
> However these would be more usefull if there were values on the vertical
> axis. Or have I been reading "How to lie with statistics" for too long?
>   

The charts compare two or more items (in this case 4).... the value or 
scale used doesn't matter, as long as it's the same scale and values for 
each item tracked.

I found it interesting to see search requests for redhat steadily 
declining, while searches for the other three distros are very close... 
and almost flat overall.

As for raw numbers in this case... I'm not interested... it's trend 
analysis.... how does one compare to another over time... maybe this is 
telling us to "short sell redhat stock". ;-)