Googles new book/word search

[Moonliner]

Google has a new toy out: The Google Ngram Viewer

Now that they have digitized a bizillion books from the 1500's on you can do a search for word use over time. For example: "Lounge" was used briefly around 1650 and has been trending up since the 1750's.



It took me a second to figure out the mid 1600's spike in this search:

[Alex]

I really hope they've cleaned up the metatagging in their catalog or this could produce some very misleading results.

For example, if you search America you'll ultimately find a bunch of hits from 1525 due to this book which was actually printed in 1904.

It apparently got tagged as 1525 because the cover art is an old English primer from 1525.

There are a lot of mistakes like that in Google's metadata. Another problem that was there at one point (I don't know if they've since fixed it) is that individual issues of magazines and other serials were tagged with the date of the first issue. So a 2000 issue of Time magazine might be listed as a 1923 source.

[Not Afraid]

I once stayed on a farm in Canada that had a pig named Francis Bacon.

[Alex]

A study in global economics.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

People may talk write about Chevy as much as they used to, but it doesn't mean they buy them...

[Alex]

Though doing that search did show another problem with this card of chart of this data.

I first did GM vs. Toyota. Then it occurred to me that there are a lot of uses of GM that isn't about the car company. So I changed it to Ford before realizing that suffered the same issue even more.

I first went there looking to make a chart comparing the synonyms for negro over time. But of course you can't because "black" blows out the chart due to its many alternate meanings.