Royal Pingdom has combed the Google data to see which distros are being searched for most offen, and how that breaks down by region.

Some interesting results here. Key findings:

• openSUSE is most popular in Russia and the Czech Republic.
• The United States doesn’t hit the top five for any distro. (That is, people in the U.S. don’t search by name for any of the distros that were studied as much as people in other countries.) The U.S. doesn’t even show up in the top ten for openSUSE or SUSE.
• Germany comes in third in terms of searches for openSUSE.
• If you change from “openSUSE” to “SUSE” the results are a bit different. Germany moves up to first, followed by Nicaragua, the Czech Republic, and Cuba. SUSE still gets a bit more love as a search term than openSUSE.
• Utah is the state that has the most searches for Linux, openSUSE, and SUSE.
• Ubuntu is getting a lot more search traffic on Google, and maxes out in Utah and California.

What do these stats tell us? Well, it’s hard to draw major conclusions from these. Really, it only shows that people are interested enough to plop a search term into a browser — and may not reflect reality in terms of people actually using Linux or any specific distro.

What would be interesting would be to see Google’s data on people searching Google from systems running Linux. How many people are browsing from Linux as opposed to browsing about Linux.

Still, every little bit of data helps. We, and I mean the “collective we” of all Linux enthusiasts hoping to spread Linux around the globe, have a lot of work ahead of us.

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