Web Forefront

Google recently launched Google Trends, a search interface which gives you a peek into what the world is searching for. Previously, Google only informed on the top queries performed worldwide, which were rarely if ever technology focused, being generally related to major worldwide events.

But with Google Trends, you can gain insight into which country -- and even city -- is performing the most queries on a particular subject. The interface even provides a historical view on search volume with related news events traced in.

Even though Google Trends explicitly states: Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. and there is no mention of scale -- hundreds or thousands of queries -- if search is a indicator of a burgeoning market, the results shed light on an interesting debate.

Here are the Google Trend results on some of the major technology platforms and languages classified by country.

1. India - by more than double the volume of No.2
2. Singapore - by a fraction (1/5) the volume of No.3
3. Hong Kong

1. India - by more than double the volume of No.2
2. Singapore - by twice the volume of No.3
3. Israel

1. Netherlands - by two times the volume of No.2 (This trend is not very reliable, since in the Netherlands SOA is a popular acronym for “seksueel overdraagbare aandoenin”, which means 'sexually transmitted disease'..argh, talk about a hard lesson in marketing)
2. India - same volume as No.3
3. Italy

1. Norway - by a third more volume than No.2
2. New Zeland - same volume as No.3
3. Ireland

1. Netherlands - by orders of magnitude on No.2 (This trend is not very reliable, ah the Dutch again are really into IT acronyms for other stuff....the Netherlands has a soccer team named AJAX which is very big in Europe)
2. Canada - by a quarter the volume of No.3
3. India - by a third the volume of No.4
4. Belgium

1. India - by three times the volume of No.2
2. Singapore - by a third the volume of No.3
3. Malaysia

While I completely agree the process of out-sourcing is often over hyped as a cost cutting panacea, myself having worked off-site on a few projects, can assure you the overhead in terms of communication, resource management and lack of face time can quickly result in cost overruns.

If these trends have a sound statistical basis and search is a result of what piques the interest of a particular working group, then it should be clear what markets are taking center stage when it comes to software development platforms.