Personally, I wish we could de-normalize the data, and compare countries in raw quantity of queries. Its not entirely clear how the data is being normalized at the moment, but its certainly imperfect.
As far as I can tell, the way it is being normalized is relatively popularity for the search term within search terms in that category. I.E. that 'Python' was the most popular (relative to other programming search terms) in Cuba. This means that it is, in a way, trying to normalize over programming population (if we accept the somewhat plausible premise that only programmers are searching for programming topics), but the results still aren't great.
It would be nice if Google made some raw data available, but I'm not holding my breath. :/
As far as I can tell, the way it is being normalized is relatively popularity for the search term within search terms in that category. I.E. that 'Python' was the most popular (relative to other programming search terms) in Cuba. This means that it is, in a way, trying to normalize over programming population (if we accept the somewhat plausible premise that only programmers are searching for programming topics), but the results still aren't great.
It would be nice if Google made some raw data available, but I'm not holding my breath. :/