New Trends Charts
⏰ Old Post
This post is over 5 years old - it might be slightly outdated and consigned to the history books.
For the past 10 years the method we'd used for compiling the Trends data was to, index the top sites, then report how many of those sites were using the technology from that run.
This simplistic approach worked well, until the Internet evolved slightly, sites no longer respond with the same technology every time you visit them, they also work differently from one source location to another. They also require deeper indexing, i.e. loading all of the JavaScript on a site to see if that fires off more calls to other JavaScript. For every top site run we are also at the mercy of the indexer working properly for that particular week which was not always the case, the top sites are also changing over time and the providers of that data could make a big change one week and not change it at all the next.
So, the new method of providing top trends data is much cleaner and more accurate. We use our Pro database to create the charts. The Pro database keeps history and detected dates for technologies over time and so allows us to re-create the charts as well as allowing us to rely on different attempts over a longer period of time to determine if a site is using a technology or not. It also keeps the top site list static for that period of time providing a fairer representation of the usage.
You can see this is the example above which is for Magento eCommerce technology - rather than the coverage having a jump then a dip then a jump again, which just doesn't seem right, the new Trend line is smoother showing a steep incline then a slow down which is a more realistic representation of Magento coverage across top sites.
The numbers are also slightly higher as we're covering the entire domain in our chart, not just the homepages of the top sites.
