On Sun, 18 Jan 2009, Adam Monsen wrote: > Anyone know how to effectively mine Google trends to compare version > control system popularity? > > I tried playing around with it, but it seems like terms that are also > normal English words might be confusing the results. For example: "git", > "bazaar"... > > http://tinyurl.com/82l9kc These aren't trends because they are searches done right now, but the idea here is to look at how often people write about migrating or converting or transitioning or changing from one system *to* another (thus the word "to" in the searches). People will also write about comparing one system to another, so we need to remember that these aren't all what we think they are. Here are some results from Google searches 52,200 for "(svn OR subversion) to git" 1,700 for "git to (svn OR subversion)" 113,000 for "(svn OR subversion) to (hg OR mercurial)" 1,070 for "(hg OR mercurial) to (svn OR subversion)" 312 for "git to (hg OR mercurial)" 2,850 for "(hg OR mercurial) to git" So it looks like more people might have written about transitioning from svn to hg than svn to git. But it also looks like more people are writing about transitioning from hg to git than from git to hg. Here's my interpretation: Hg came out before git by about 8 months during which time people probably started getting interested in Mercurial: git 1.0 release on December 21, 2005 Mercurial first release on April 19, 2005 Then git came out, but a lot of people were saying it looked like hit had a bright future but it was hard to understand it and the docs were bad. But then git kept on improving so that now more hg users are thinking about transitioning to git than the other way around. Anyway, those are my guesses. Mike