[simonh]

It's not necessarily as bad as it seems because this is relative to overall search term popularity. As more non-techies adopted the Internet, the prevalence of all techie topics declined, some more than others. E.g. Python is more popular as ever, but it's search term interest peaked in 2006, even though it's absolute search numbers increased nicely.

I don't think google do trend graphs for absolute search numbers, so one way to approximate that is to compare the graphs for competing terms using Google Trends (1). So to get a feel for how popular Python is, compare it's trend graph to say Java or Ruby.

Another factor I suspect may be relevant for Linux is that the rise of prominent distros has probably sapped away search term activity for general searches for Linux.

(1) http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore