Google: January 2007 Archives
I am fighting between the words "baffled" and "amazed" to describe what I saw today on Google Trends. "Baffled" has a bit of speculation and "amazed" is all happy. God, it doesn't matter. It was cool !!(for the lack of words).
Google Trends is a pretty neat service that plots various search request Google receives. Basically telling you how many search request it received over a defined period. I was trying out some of our favourite searches in there raw from (no extra qualifiers). The service also tries to map news stories related to the search request and how it affected the search behaviour. One other bit of information around the graph : where did the search came i.e. Location. One can view cities, countries and even language. Neat han.
Now the interesting part. I search for java, xml, j2ee, linux, eclipse and also some odds like ubuntu linux, ruby on rails, phython, php. Well, the graph wasn't shockwave here. If you look at the cities, almost always there were 2-3 Indian cities in the list of 10.WOW. There were times there were 5 in the top 10. Most notably Banglore, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi. It was a great feeling in a way but am still baffled (there, i picked the word).
Well, we know India in booming in the high tech industry, but what surprises me considering the popularity of google, having a majority share in search request is a big big thing. That to me, means a hell lot of people back home are searching for tech stuff. The baffling part :
- Internet is not that widely used. Its changing but we have a long way to go.
- Not everyone is doing computers. This is relative to a huge large population base. Thus the search request are maily concentrated to only a very small fraction of the people. This would mean lots of clicks per geek.
- This one is a bit sad then baffling. All the cool searches don't have Indian cities listed at all. Atom, Ruby, ubuntu,django. An appeal : Atom Pub is goooooooood, RSS is not.
- It seems only the big brands (in terms of amount of money spent on advertising) have hit a chord with india i.e. .Net and related technologies and Java and gang. Python and PHP not hitting the nail right, which is sad again.
- Is the tech industry that hot in India? I knew it was warm but this definitely is hot.
Disclaimer:
I do understand the usual caveats of statistical analysis, there are lot other factors involved, dataset is not really connected to the topic in question. And ofcourse, I did not try every available tech search possible but tried enough to get the picture right.
