Comment by spokey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spokey | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure that Google trends graph is telling us that PHP is losing ground. I mean, it's a measure of the number of times someone searches for "PHP" relative to all other search terms, right? You'd get the same shape if the raw number of searches on "PHP" have remained more or less constant while the number of non-PHP searches have gone up, for instance, because the ratio of techies to non-techies on the internet has declined.

For example, if you factor out the seasonal fluctuations, calculus and physics have also "lost ground":

http://www.google.com/trends?q=calculus&ctab=0&geo=a...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=physics&ctab=0&geo=al...

In fact, Linux and Unix have lost significant ground by this metric as well:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=linux&ctab=0&geo=all&...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=unix&ctab=0&geo=all&#...

The langpop data doesn't go back as far, but suggests that PHP is more popular than 2-3 years ago: http://langpop.com/timeline.html

I don't know if PHP is more or less popular than it was 6 years ago, but I suspect Google trends doesn't either.

Going off of this, it could also be the case that other languages are going up, while PHP stays steady (or grows at a lesser pace).

Maybe. I'm having trouble finding a programming language with a moderately long history (say, over 2 years) that isn't trending down on Google trends.

Ruby comes close to holding steady: http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby&ctab=0&geo=all&#...

So does Python: http://www.google.com/trends?q=python&ctab=0&geo=all...

but virtually everything else I've tried is trending down. (Well, Clojure is growing, but only shows about 12 months of measurable data. It's hard not to grow when you start at 0, as Clojure did when it launched in 2007)

I agree though that "flat is the new up" on this graph since the number of people searching for programming topics isn't growing as fast as the number of people using Google.

It's the Linux search that makes me think Google trends isn't a reliable metric for the popularity of a technology topic. Surely Linux isn't losing mind share as quickly as that graph is declining.

Seconded about Google trends being a bad way to measure anything.

Though, I think that people might be searching less for php and more for php frameworks. I guess with the success of ROR and Django, people are looking more to imitate that success by using similar frameworks.

That's a good point. While PHP is trending down, several PHP frameworks are trending up, notably Joomla: http://www.google.com/trends?q=joomla%2Cdrupal%2Cdjango%2Cdc...

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