The results are in: Java has hit the top of mind on Google’s Zeitgeist 2007, scoring the 8th position on the “what …” list. But… “what?” Exactly. If even the average Joe is wondering what is Java, I don’t see how that can be a good thing. What these results tell me is not that there is a burst of new developers willing to learn Java, or that the language is so utterly good that even non-technical people are curious. Google’s Zeitgeist will probably never feature wxWidgets or C++, because they’re just invisible to the end user. You don’t see a wxWidgets logo when a wxWidgets application is loading, nor do you ask a user to update his libc. I would rather hear “I don’t know what is Java” than to hear “Oh, I know. It is that thing that was bugging me!” Java needs better integration with browsers and OSes. Java should be invisible to the end-user.

This entry was posted by on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 9:39 am and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Java ranked 8th on Google’s Zeitgeist 2007”

  1. Not sure I agree with your logic to be honest.

    There are lots of reasons why folk could be searching for Java; since Sun has changed its ticker symbol, then perhaps a lot of investment types are doing searches for it.

    Having a look at some other entries in the list, do you think that lots of end users are searching the web to find out what SAP is?

    Point is, lots of people use Google, not just end users.

     
  2. Seems most likely this was fueled by Sun switching it’s stock ticker to JAVA, and not by any knowledge of the actual language itself.

     
  3. Interesting. Only two of the six biggest news mentioning java are related to the language, but none of them is related to the stock ticker either:

    http://www.google.com/trends?q=java

     
  4. Although I admit this is just speculation, I still find it hard to believe that a Sun shareholder would not know what Java is. Moreover, a “what is java” query on Google returns just Java language results on the first pages. If anyone is using Google to know what is Java, it’s the language they’re going to find.

     

Leave a Reply