Is that really how Google gauges interest? Raw number of searches? I would think it's more useful to normalize in some way (perhaps by searches across all count

Is that really how Google gauges interest? Raw number of searches? I would think it's more useful to normalize in some way (perhaps by searches across all countries) for the very reason you state. If so, maybe what's happening is that Baidu doesn't provide very good results for Golang, so a relatively large proportion of Google's small market presence in China are people who jumped to Google just to search for Golang.