Disclaimer: what follows below is just chit-chat oriented, no serious assumptions down there 
Playing with Google Trends I settled for doing yet-another Linux distro competition. Here’s the results:
So the question is: does Ubuntu success help Linux ? Sure as smurfs ! (you believe in smurfs, right ?) From the graphs, anyway, seems like people interest in other distribution actually decreased. Gosh, one would expect them to be slowly growing, just because of last times general Linux success and hype.
Even worse, net’s interest in Debian itself seems uninfluenced or deteriorated.
This is not to say Ubuntu is detrimental to Debian. Ubuntu contributes patches back to debian, for example. (while the quantity of the contributions has been disputed sometimes).
While the above is obviously disputable, one thing I know for sure. Ubuntu hurted Britney Spears popularity. See yourself:
Sorry Britney, we love you.
Not only that, but it looks like interest in Ubuntu has plateaued (damn there are a lot of vowels in that word). There may even have been slightly more queries for Ubuntu during the 7.10 release than during the 8.04 release, and the latter is an LTS.
I have played with that myself some time ago. Imho, the popularity of Fedora and Debian is not decreasing – its just that technical topics decline in percentage to other search topics. I remember that I tried OpenGL, Java, Linux and the like. And you can see that people really have a tremendous interest in drivers (nvidia, ati) and DirectX around christmas time.
[...] så Stefano’s blog indlæg hvor han vha. Google. trends undersøger forskellige Linux distributioners popularitet over tid (ud [...]
Interesting stats!
If you look here: http://tinyurl.com/5mtgoc you see that Ubuntu has also decreased the attention for linux! It is true that many people are using Ubuntu as a synonym for linux!
Also very interesting are the small bulbs every time a new Ubuntu version has been released.
@Sense: looks like Ubuntu will surpass Linux itself in the next few years.
Now go back doing your bug triaging homework 