Here are the top ten locations as of January 9 2007, according to Google trends:

1. Pune, India
2. Bangalore, India
3. Hyderabad, India
4. Chennai, India
5. Mumbai, India
6. Singapore, Singapore
7. Delhi, India
8. Tokyo, Japan
9. Chiyoda, Japan
10. Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Note that the top cities are all Asian. A search for “J2EE” returns almost exactly the same list. Now, compare the list for a representative new, trendy technology, Ruby on Rails:

1. San Francisco, CA, USA
2. Austin, TX, USA
3. Pleasanton, CA, USA
4. Seattle, WA, USA
5. Salt Lake City, UT, USA
6. Portland, OR, USA
7. Vancouver, Canada
8. Denver, CO, USA
9. Oslo, Norway
10. Auckland, New Zealand

This time, it’s 80% North American and 0% Asian, and more interestingly, all of those cities are west of the Mississippi. The easiest interpretation of this very small sample is that the Asian companies concentrate on established technologies that they can be paid for using, while the North American west coast companies are disproportionately interested in new, unproven technologies. What about a new technology that’s designed to work with an older one? Could we expect a mix of Asian and North American west coast cities? Here are the top cities searching for “XQuery”:

1. San Jose, CA, USA
2. Bangalore, India
3. Singapore, Singapore
4. Chennai, India
5. San Francisco, CA, USA
6. Mumbai, India
7. Pleasanton, CA, USA
8. San Diego, CA, USA
9. Washington, DC, USA
10. Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The implication of this very unscientific survey is that you can determine the relative maturity of a technology by looking at the weighting of search origins between western North America and eastern Asia.