As a riff on Ninos comment, if one goes to Google/more/even more/trends and
types into the search box "Linux" you will see an ongoing graph of what I
"think" is "the number of times something was searched for".
If you then go to the search bar and enter "RedHat" you will see that the
graph of searches for RedHat has trended down.
If you then type in Ubuntu, you will see that it is trending up and then
levels off, kind of, with spikes when there are releases.
The big idea here is that the searches for the distros does seem to SOMEwhat
indicate how a distro is trending.
So.... the developers could compare the number of downloads over the last
"time frame" and if the numbers are going up, or at least trending level,
with spikes during releases then things might be going pretty well.
If one types into the search Trisquel one sees a similar graph, it seems to
go up and down but is staying relatively level.
So....back to the original idea of having Trisquel as a home page. Or going
to Distrowatch.
The mere act of typing in the name does, it seems, add to things.
In the case of Google, they have a very complex algorithm for moving a site
up or down in the returns for an item and some have said that they have an
"unstated" policy of bumping up a new site that they think "has worth" or is
"commercially helpful to them" to see what happens and then let it sink or
swim, but that may be paranoia on the part of people who have said it.
So...given that if one searched once per day for "free Linux" then another
person who used the same term might have a better chance of getting Trisquel
as one of the higher choices if the website has the word "free" in the
metatags.
That, of course would depend on what the developers want to have in the
metatags, or the "first sentence" of the website.
So setting one's home page to Trisquel would probably help in one way and
going to DW would help in another and searching each day for it might help in
another.
It is complicated.... :(
janus
