Non-Profit Tech Blog

So Google’s version of Alexa’s tracking software is now out. It’s called Google Trends. It’s a tool that tracks an unspecified subset of all the searches for a particular set of search terms. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to rely on the way people search for CMSes as a way of creating your data set for the trends chart that Google Trends creates. The upshot of all this is that it’s very difficult to track items such as Ruby (the programming language not the gem) and Mambo (the CMS and not the music).

I’ve created an interesting comparison of the search terms: drupal, joomla, plone and mambo. Check it out.

Many of the charts I have shown for OSS CMS analysis all show the decline in interest in the Mambo CMS and the growth of Joomla. This hasn’t changed in the chart. In fact, Google Trends (as of this posting), is kind enough to mark the decline in Mambo CMS interest by presenting a link to a August 22, 2005 posting on ZDNet that talks of the Mambo/Joomla fork.

Again, Drupal looks like it’s pulling ahead of Plone in terms of search interest by Google users. As of June 2005, the term Drupal has been searched on more than Plone. Plone is still holding its own though as also earlier confirmed in other posts on this blog.

The one unique thing that Google Trends show is which city, region or what language does each search user speak for each search term you provide. While Google Trends presents a Top 10 list of cities that search on a particular term. Apparently, Google uses a ratio based on the number of searches for that term divided by total searches from that city. Basically, it shows a city’s web geek factor. Fascinating: New York is DEFINITELY not geeky. For whatever reason, cities in Europe or in the Western US (especially San Francisco) are more interested in OSS CMS development when considered as a ratio of the total number of searches for that city.

The city most interested in searching on Joomla is Athens, Greece. For Plone AND Drupal, it’s Budapest, Hungary.

Just as a teaser and because I’ve been playing around with it, I tossed in “ruby on rails” as a search term. American dominance is prevalent with 8 of the top 10 cities searching on that term in the United States. Expect this to change as RoR gets more and more popular in development circles.