An explanation of the strange dip in Java popularity in 2004:<p>Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?<p>A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident.<p><a href="http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....</a>