Silverlight vs Flex : the hype and the search trends

There has been no shortage of hype about Microsoft's Silverlight during 2007. But I was playing around with Google Trends the other day and started wondering how well the hype translated into user interest. The graph shows the relative number of Google searches on the terms Flex and Silverlight. The most interesting things was that although Silverlight wasn't far behind in terms of news reference it was a very different story when you looked at actual searches, even when there were news spikes for Silverlight. Obviously search trends aren't the ultimate indicator for market interest but they are still help to give some idea of whats really happening among developers. These results can also be skewed when a search is done on terms that may have alternative contexts. For example, my original search included AJAX and it seemed that The Netherlands were obsessed with AJAX. This seemed odd until I looked at the news items and realised there was a soccer team named AJAX.