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Comment by mc808 | Hacker News Reader

It could be that 'golang' is not popular enough for statistical comparisons to be insightful. For a chuckle, look up 'golang' on Google Trends and then add the second term 'perl'.

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Sure, and you can draw the conclusion that Perl is declining and Go is rising.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr%2C%20%...

Or you can conclude that the topics trends beta has a ton of work left to do on it. For instance there's no way golang has more interest than Objective C and Swift put together, but that's what trends beta claims.

How can you be so sure about it. First of all, Go is not generating more interest than Obj-C[1]. Secondly, most searches regarding language still happens inside the GFW(like on Baidu). So ya, trend search certainly doesn't tell you the whole story about total usage, yet it still tells you part of the story, which is the "trend" IMO.

1. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr%2C%20%...

It suggests that despite its recent growth, Go still has such a low search volume that it barely registers against a language that has practically disappeared from the radar. Combine that with Google's small presence in China and whatever unknown formula they use to normalize popularity in each country, and it could actually be that Go is not significantly more popular in China than in other places. Apparently HHVM is a huge hit in Belgium. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=hhvm&cmpt=q&tz=

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