Google Trends allows you to compare the popularity of various search terms. A friend pointed me at this, having put Java into it and noted a "dropping trend". I played around with it for a while, sticking in various language names, and came away with more questions than answers.

How to write stupid conclusions

The obvious but stupid way to write a blog post based upon Google trends would be to look at the graph for Java, look at the graph for Lua (a recent scripting language suited to embedding) and spurt out things like, "OMGWTFBBQ LOOK! Java is getting less popular and Lua is getting more popular!". Let's look more carefully at this, though...