Re: Google trends

Patrick Ion said:
> Dear Juan,
>
> In another message you bring up some, at first glance amusing, results
> from Google Trends.  But I think that mention of them in this discussion
> is probably specious.   Google Trends says of itself
> <<<
> Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. As a
> Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of
> development.
> Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several
> approximations are used when computing your results. Please
> keep this in mind when using it.
> <<<

It is unlikely that great difference between CSS and MathML, the
increasing interest in CSS (e.g. renowed interest of MSIE on CSS, the
recent news about printing with CSS, the new CSS formatter appeared this
year) and the rest was an artifact of the Trends algorithm.

Note also that decreasing of interest on MathML on the web observed in
Google Trends coincides with that from TtM statistics and with Huckison
statement that there is not real interest to provide MathML output in his
last 5 years data.

Any case the Trend may be more accurate that use of Miner link to a MathML
bussines page containing just links to clients (no additional data, no
percentages, no timelines...) for radiography of MathML popularity (or
lack of).

> The first thing one notes about the graphs is that there
> seems to be no vertical scale.  This makes them hard
> to interpret rationally.  Scientific data without scales is
> not very helpful.

Hum, the tendencies are independent of scale.

> I remark that ISO 12083 does not have enough search volume to show
> graphs,
>
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=ISO%2012083&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
>
> though MathML does.

Yes, also OpenMath offers not enough volume

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=OpenMath&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all]

> http://www.google.com/trends?q=MathML&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
>
> CML does only because it can mean many things,

Yes and using the full name

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=%28Chemical+Markup+Language%29&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all]

but that is waited. CML is so unpopular as MathML. In last STM Conference
(18 October, 2005) prof P. Murray-Rust (one of fathers of CML) said that
publishers have failed to adapt to the web, internet and ICT in general.
He remarked that publishers need to get away from their fixation on PDF
and GIFF, and move to XML, MathML, CML, etc.

He also added something of great interest; He claimed that the web is
bigger than the publishing community and that if the latter doesn’t
change, the new developments will happen anyway and leave them high and
dry.

That is one of reasons some of us are so interested in publishing with CSS
instead with presentation MathML (even if a couple of publishers are using
latter in their internal workflows as Miner remarked very well).

> After all, CSS is collecting some traffic for the Center for
> Sustainable Systems (University of Michigan here in
> Ann Arbor, like Google's just announced new office),
> Cornell Composting Science, various Community and
> Social Services, etc.  For that matter Madonna covers a
> number of instances too.

And do you seriously think that is distorting a lot of the Trend for
cascading style sheets?

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=%28Center+for+Sustainable+Systems%29&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all]

Try to eliminate (at least partially) the redundant traffic, e.g.

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=CSS+-%28Center+for+Sustainable+Systems%29%2C+CSS&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all]

Or look what is main trafic for CSS input in Google search engine

[http://www.google.com/search?q=CSS&btnG=Search]

I think that another way to see that the Google Trends for MathML may be
accurate is in the number of tools generated last year and percentage with
previous ones.

How many browsers supported MathML in previous years and how many were
added last year or this one? none? How many blogs beyond Distler one are
now using MathML after last years? E.g. Not Even Wrong academic blog
rejected MathML support last year and provide mathematical capabilites via
an no-MathML plugin in the blog software)

How many journals are following the original Living Review example? In all
cases, the tendency _appears_ to follow the trend


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Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Monday, 17 July 2006 12:06:13 UTC