Measuring Software Popularity [closed]

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Does anyone have any ideas on measuring the popularity of an open source project? I thought it would be interesting to create a tools which would compare the popularity of similar open source projects.

The first metric that came to mind was to compare the number of Google results for each specific software, but it seems difficult to programmatically obtain this number (other than scraping it from the direct search page - this also runs into legal issues with Google I believe).

Any other metric ideas? I'd like the end product to be a tool, so metrics which are able to be accessed through code would be preferred.

Thanks,

Chris

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If the projects are hosted by platforms like Sourceforge or Github, you can access the number of downloads...

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SourceForge offer download statistics; http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=263007&ugn=dvwa&mode=week&type=prdownload

Google Code have activity ratings.

Maybe you could use those?