Perl Blogs

Tim Bunce posted about Perl Blogs last week talking in part about the sorry state of results
that comes from Google when you perform a “perl blog” search.

To help rectify this Tim has added the phrases “perl blog” & “perl programming” to his blog page.
I’ve also done the same to my sidebar and hopefully more Perl Blogs can follow Tim’s lead to help get rid of Google sickly results.

Of course there are additional motives behind all this. Now whether your concerned about Perl’s position in TIOBE results or not it is annoying that they have a few flaws in their processes which can paint a very inaccurate picture.

Clearly it is a concern to The Perl Foundation because Richdard Dice (President of TPF) in a recent interview in $foo magazine mentioned about opening up some dialogue with TIOBE.

Perhaps the TPF can do something about it. And we can also help by doing our little bit.

However more can be done. Here’s are some Google search results which you may find interesting….

    
    site:cpan.org                       1,070,000 results
    site:cpan.org perl                  495,000 results
    site:cpan.org +"perl programming"   1260 results!

If I’m reading this correctly then only 0.12% of all the CPAN pages have the phrase “Perl Programming” in!

TIOBE use +”perl programming” in their searches. Now imagine if a phrase like….

CPAN – The Perl Programming Archive

was added to every page on CPAN 😉

NB. And remember that CPAN pages are also mirrored on other websites!

I think it makes sense that every CPAN page is included by TIOBE in their analysis. If pages like these don’t show the popularity of a language then what does!

Bumping your TIOBE ratings like this isn’t new because do you recall the rise of Delphi from end of last year? Well this was due in part by the Delphi community making a similar concerted effort. Also it was due to fact of an emergence of a shiny new Google product and TIOBE having “Chrome” has part of the Delphi search criteria 😉

/I3az/

PS. On a slightly related note I have also added a Perlsphere badge to this blogs sidebar.