Google publishes indices of the most popular search terms (keywords) used in its search engine. It has a normalizing algorithm that yields scores for terms relative to the most popular term considered over a period of time. Here, I’ve plotted and mapped the data concerning programming languages from 2004 to the present (September, 2013).

During this time period, Java has always been the most popular search subject. Its popularity peaked in March, 2004. For each week, I normalized each language’s score to that of the Java score (including Java’s score, bringing it to 100 for every week). Because the data were recorded at such a short time interval, they looked noisy, so I smooth them using a five-week moving average, which allows us to distinguish between languages more easily.

After Java, SQL has generally been the most searched language, though recently C has contested for that spot. Perl and Visual Basic have both been on a steady decline while Ruby and Python have slowly increased in popularity.

The maps show, not surprisingly, that the Bay Area is the hotspot for programming languages (and the people who search for them). The top city searching for C# (designed by Microsoft) is Redmond, WA, where Microsoft is headquartered. Perl’s top city is Hillsboro, OR, which is home to a large Intel office. Finally, I guess politicians need their databases managed, because SQL’s top city is Washington, D.C.

Data source: http://www.google.com/trends/