After a search on Google yielded more results for Linux than Windows, it was easy to get carried away.

Yesterday I was doing some research on Google, and thought I'd compare the number of results for different words and phrases. Here were a few of the surprising results:

• Linux, 47,100,000
• Windows, 43,800,000
• UNIX, 12,200,000
• Open Source, 2,740,000
• Free software, 1,760,000

That's how far I got before the kid came home from school. But when I picked the job up this morning, the results had changed:

• Linux, 51,700,000
• Windows, 46,700,000
• UNIX, 13,000,000
• Open Source, 2,810,000
• Free software, 1,780,000

That piqued my curiosity, so I just began searching for a whole pile of words. The results might not be meaningful, but they're still interesting:

• U.S. 244,000,000
• site, 200,000,000
• U.K., 75,300,000
• sex, 82,600,000
• love, 49,800,000
• Canada, 35,100,000
• Microsoft, 29,200,000
• Japan, 26,800,000
• HP (including Hewlett Packard), 25,560,000
• death, 24,800,000
• fun, 24,200,000
• Australia, 22,300,000
• China, 21,900,000
• Germany, 18,500,000
• England, 16,400,000
• IBM, 16,300,000
• Russia, 10,800,000
• GNU, 9,040,000
• Debian, 9,620,000
• Apple, 8,940,000
• fear, 8,800,000
• drugs, 8,170,000
• coffee, 7,830,000
• commands, 7,370,000
• Finland, 6,920,000
• Solaris, 6,540,000
• Compaq, 5,460,000
• chicken, 5,100,000
• smoke, 4,840,000
• GNOME, 4,810,000
• United States, 4,610,000
• KDE, 4,540,000
• OS X, 4,060,000
• BSD, 3,190,000
• SourceForge, 3,800,000
• SuSE, 3,660,000
• beef, 3,000,000
• Mandrake, 2,840,000
• foo, 2,180,000
• girlfriend, 2,150,000
• Red Hat, 2,140,000
• Slashdot, 2,080,000
• VA Software (including VA Linux), 2,043,000
• Bill Clinton, 1,670,000
• penguin, 1,510,000
• boyfriend, 1,450,000
• George W. Bush, 1,260,000
• MacOS, 1,150,000
• Slackware, 1,050,000
• rock & (also and) roll, 894,000
• Caldera, 787,000
• Al Gore, 644,000
• Linus Torvalds, 638,000
• VA Linux, 553,000
• melon, 525,000
• Albert Einstein, 510,000
• LinuxPPC, 294,000
• Turbolinux, 250,000

Okay, that's enough. I have real work to do.

Speaking of which, I'm always looking for numbers to stick in the next "LJ Index "and elsewhere in the "UpFront" section of Linux Journal. If you have any you want to send along or point us to, please do.

- Doc Searls (doc-at-ssc.com)