Re: Advocacy Links, people using PostgreSQL, Trends.

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> I tried this search:
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=PostgreSQL%2Cdb2&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
> and I find the result pretty surprising. Why are there peaks and
> valleys at the same time for both periods?
> What this says to me is that these graphs are meaningless.

Not meaningless, they just don't mean what you might think, and certainly
Guido's characterization isn't right at all. Both the PostgreSQL and DB2
graphs are suggesting how often people search for database-related terms
relative to other types of searches. That's been dropping steadily during
that period as people use the web more for other things, and you'll see
the same graph shape for Oracle and MySQL too.

As for the correlated peaks and valleys, you can see traffic drop off
around the holidays in December every year and pick back up again the day
after Christmas; that's the true cause of many of them, because shopping
searches dominate those periods.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD