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Not so easy

Not so easy

Posted Apr 14, 2007 21:24 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Not so easy by man_ls
Parent article: Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

The graph does not show the scale, so it is not so easy to discern anything beyond a general trend.

Is the scale logarithmic, where is the zero?

It was the goal, I think. That's where "trends" in name comes from. Scale is not logarithmic (easy to see if you'll try queries with different popularities), but number of queries is "per million requests" (or something like this).

However, according to this Linux is in decline itself. Go figure.

Linux is in decline compared to all search traffic. This means most internet citizens don't care about Linux - there are a lot of things to search: PSP, Wii, MySpace and so on...


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Not so easy

Posted Apr 15, 2007 13:13 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Linux is in decline compared to all search traffic.
Hmmm... So, it's perfectly possible that other distros have not lost users, but Ubuntu has grown the installed base?

Not so easy

Posted Apr 15, 2007 13:47 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Hmmm... So, it's perfectly possible that other distros have not lost users, but Ubuntu has grown the installed base?

May be. Search traffic is growing, Linux/Ubuntu/Debian searches are probably all growing too - but can we be sure that means number of users is growing too ? Nope: we need outside data. We do know that people were switching to Google in this period, we probably are using search engines more often today then we did yesterday, etc. That's why absolute values will give us more info about Google then they will give us info about Linux/Ubuntu/Debian... Relative values are quite reliable - unless masochistic Ubuntu users do 10 times more searches while trying to fix endless problems... Possible but highly unlikely...

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