[OT] Google Trends

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 07:36 -0700, Don Russell wrote:
> 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". ;-)
----
it would be impossible to infer anything of significance beyond the
trend (google searches for red hat, et. al.) and it takes nothing else
into account (were the searches for help in which case perhaps the help
resources are improving to the point of people relying less upon google
to find help), familiarity with the Red Hat brand/name (less people
needing to find out who Red Hat is), etc.

FWIW, Microsoft too is trending downward. It doesn't mean anything.

Nice exercise in nothing though

Craig