Google Labs always offers a set of nifty tools for sorting through the billions of pieces of data and information that pass through their servers. One new and interesting feature is Google Trends. Trends reports on the history of search terms, reporting the top search origins for a search term as well as the trend in how often it has been searched for.
So I typed in data model and found something that surprised me. The top location of searchers for data model is....Bangalore, India. In fact, the top 5 positions for people seeking more information about data modelings is India. The figure below is a sample of the information returned by Google trends.
Singapore is next, and then it is Washington, DC breaking in to the list at position seven. If you read into the help portion of this tool, you'll find that the result are determined based on sampling the massive amount of server log data they collect as each visitor uses their sight.
So does the fat that 7 of top ten positions on this list are located outside North America mean that more non-NA people are learning data modeling? Could it mean that more outside the US are working on data models? Could it mean that there aren't enough people in the US working in IT to break out higher in the list? We won't know just from looking at this data. Perhaps a better test would be to look at sales of data modeling books in each country? Or the numbers of students taking courses in data management. Or...
What are your guesses as to the significance of this data?