Dan Kegel wrote:
It's a small effect, and it's not really surprising, but if you look at a graph of the relative search volume for the phrases linux wine linux photoshop linux warcraft linux steam it seems that each time a new big app starts working on Linux enough for people to start searching for it (photoshop, warcraft, steam), the number of queries for linux wine goes up a little bit.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=linux+wine%2Clinux+photoshop%2C+linux+warcraf...
I'm just pleased to see that the effect is measurable, and not lost in the noise...
This is a better graph:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu+wine%2Cubuntu+photoshop%2Cubuntu+warcr...
It's ubuntu specific, however over the past few years queries for Linux Wine have been more or less flat and instead replaced with more specific queries like Linux Ubuntu. Searching for a particular distribution eliminates the confounding effect.
Anyway, I don't quite see the trend you're talking about. The little blips for Ubuntu Warcraft, Ubuntu Steam, and Ubuntu Photoshop do correspond with upticks in Ubuntu Wine, however they're all clustered around Ubuntu releases.
It certainly seems reasonable that new big applications working would drive interest in Wine and therefore search queries, but I'm not sure how to separate that out from interest due to releases in general.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie