Measuring success of open source projects using web search engines

Abstract

What makes an open source project successful?
\nIn this paper we show that the traditional factors of success of open source projects, such as number of downloads, deployments or commits are sometimes inconvenient or even insufficient. We then correlate success of an open source project with its popularity on the Web. We show several ideas of how such popularity could be measured using Web search engines and provide experimental results from quantitative analysis of the proposed measures on representative large samples of open source projects from SourceForge.