Measuring Success of Open Source Projects Using Web Search Engines

What makes an open source project successful? In this paper we show that the traditional factors of success of open source projects, such as the number of downloads, deployments or community activity are inconvenient to collect or 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 measures we introduce on representative large samples of open source projects from SourceForge.