Just for fun, I thought I’d spend some time last night playing with Google Insights for Search to find out what parts of the country are most interested in technology — at least the buzzwords that fill my day — and when that interest hit its peak. It wasn’t surprising to see Silicon Valley rank at or near the top everywhere, but did you know Utah was so into next-generation programming?
As an introduction, it’s probably good to have an understanding of how Google Insights ranks search interest. Essentially, it normalizes data to give a picture of how likely people in each state are to search for a particular term, not necessarily what states had the most overall searches for any particular term. Here’s how Google explains it:
Just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn’t mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. Data from these two regions – with significant differences in search volumes – can be compared equally because the data has been normalized by the total traffic from each respective region.
The state maps are accurate as of Jan. 8, 2012. The embedded charts are live and will change over time.
Cloud computing
Search interest in cloud computing peaked in April 2011, the same month Amazon Web Services suffered a four-day outage that made national headlines. Coincidence?
Somewhat interestingly, people in Massachussetts, Maryland and Washington, D.C., were more likely do search for “cloud computing” than were people in California. However, there is a respectable tech and venture-capital scene around Boston, and a large federal presence (both government and military) in D.C. and the surrounding areas.
Big data
It’s hard to call the November 2011 the peak for interest in big data, as it has been growing consistently for the past year and might well go even higher.
Utah? Hmm. I’ll chalk up New York’s presence to the banking industry.
Hadoop
Cloudera launched in March 2009, the same time interest in Hadoop began its steady ascent.
I’m not sure what to make of the disparity in interest between “Hadoop” and “big data” among the states. Perhaps the two aren’t as tightly aligned in people’s minds as I thought. Although, “big data hadoop” was the No. 4 search term for “big data”.
NoSQL
The peak in October 2011 might have something to do with Oracle getting into the NoSQL space. I’m blanking on the March 2010 spike — any ideas?
Again with Utah, although the government seems less concerned with NoSQL than with other tech trends.
A few more interesting points
Utah ranks highly in interest for other programming trends, including Node.js.
The Salt Lake City metropolitan area actually shows up high in interest for Javascript and iOS.
If you’re wondering who’s interested in more-advanced techniques, look to advanced tech universities. I’m going to assume the presence of Carnegie Mellon University has something to do with Pittsburgh’s relative interest in machine learning.
And people apparently get interested in sharing photos via Instagram when they’re on vacation.
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