Update: New 2010 numbers can be found here.

The other day, I was wondering to myself, “What are the most popular web frameworks right now?” Finding accurate numbers is actually pretty hard, so I decided to go to the expert: Google.

Sometimes you can (very unscientifically) determine something’s popularity by simply noting how many references Google has to a particular keyword or phrase, so here are the current results:

Web programming languages:

  • ASP.NET: 86 million
  • Ruby: 101 million
  • PHP: 2.95 billion

Specific web frameworks:

  • Symfony: 4.6 million
  • CakePHP: 4.8 million
  • Ruby on Rails: 5.4 million

I was really surprised that PHP beat ASP.NET by such a wide margin. I was also happy to see that Symfony (my framework of choice) was holding its own against CakePHP and RoR.

It was really surprising to see that Ruby had more references than ASP.NET. Perhaps I’m not searching for the right string. I’d be interested to hear others’ results.