It’s All Downhill from Here
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Google Labs has this new lexical research tool you may have read about called a Book Ngram Viewer, which allows you to peek inside five million books published between the 15th century and 2008 to see how many discussed antigravity and when:
Semiconductors:
Michael Jackson:
And good old-fashioned fornicating:
But most important of all, since this is simply a new form of Googling we’re talking about, we can look up ourselves:
Obviously, as my young and lovely wife frequently says, my best days are behind me, while fornicating seems to be more popular than ever.
But wait, there’s more! Since these are books we’re talking about and books take time to publish, or used to, my literary popularity probably peaked earlier, in say 2001.
And if you look really closely at the numbers on the y-axis you’ll see something truly amazing. Fornicating is not only on the rise, it is eight times as popular as I am. Antigravity is 1.2 times as popular as fornicating, which is either senseless or a really amazing bit of news. Michael Jackson is four times more popular than fornicating (38 times more popular than me). And semiconductors — semiconductors — while they have been in decline since 1990 (fully 12 years before my career hit the skids) were at their peak 7.5 times as popular as Michael Jackson, 30 times more popular than fornicating, and 240 times as popular as me. There’s simply something wrong about that one.
Now talk among yourselves.
well, you were right about the amount of homework…
So antigravity fornicating should be next years big craze then.
Not as early as next year, but Free Fall Fornication will happen, we humans have done it everywhere else.
I call Trademark on Bungie Quickie
I notice that the usage of most words seems to decline in the last few years.
I assume this just means that Google doesn’t have that many recent books indexed.
But if the number of mentions depends on number of books indexed for each year, then Google Ngrams doesn’t really convey much useful information, since it doesn’t show this.
➥ By the way, Bob, on a technical note, can I make the suggestion that you allow commenters to preview their posts before posting. There is a good little WordPress plugin that does this easily: Ajax Comment Preview
Do Google know anything? I know they think they do, but I’m not convinced. I know they think Flu is on the rise because more people are searching for it. But is that true? Could it be that the “fear of Flu” is on the rise, and not actually Flu at all? I think Google are guilty of not understanding a fundamental of computer science:
Data and information are not the same.
I know this sounds counter intuitive, but here’s a concrete example – consider the following:
6
Mandy is 6 years old
The “6″ is data, we have no idea what the “6″ refers to. In the second we know that some one called “Mandy” is 6 years old. That’s information, albeit rather incomplete. Computers deal with data – they don’t turn it information, we do. The trouble is you are doing a transformation, and this itself is an error prone activity.
Google know data, they can index it and reproduce it like nobody else. But understanding what it means – that’s more illusive. It reminds me of what I was told about accounts:
Accountants know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Meaning they can tell you that your company van is worth x dollars, but they can’t express that the van is vital to the smooth running of your delivery business. Which is why, if you think about it, you should never listen to your accountant about business decisions. Probably explains why we’re all in such a mess now.
Google are much like that. So looking at these graphs it might be tempting to think that we won’t be buying semiconductors because we’ll all be too busy fornicating. However, I think we’ll still be buying them, and wasting their potential Googling about “fornicating”.
@ Jeremy Chappel: Good post thanks, but – “that’s more illusive” ?
Don’t you mean ‘elusive’?
allusive
allusive…refer or lead to something else.
illusive…refer to something false.
elusive…hard to understand.
When exactly did the British start using the plural verb with the singular noun, and, more importantly, WHY? I understand that a team or an organization (e.g., Google) is made up of many people. But the subject is SINGULAR! There is only ONE Google! Google IS. I have read many books published in Britain in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries, and this seems to be a relatively new introduction and appears to have something to do with an attempt to make English “logical,” after failing miserably at making it like Latin, which was the last linguistic aberration to come out of Britain (all that nonsense about ending a sentence with a preposition).
So what? Several million people are probably searching “Justin Bieber” right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s important to anybody, nor will it ever be.
No doubt one could have searched Google books and discovered that the quote about accountants was a misquote of Oscar Wilde – “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”.
s/peak inside/peek inside/g
To Cringe’s credit, the other 2 uses of “peak” in the article were correct. Must have had “peak” on the mind. Stupid homonyms!
Given his repeated references to “fornication” I’m wondering if “peak inside” was not in and of itself some kind of Freudian slip.
yeah, but now they can serve in the Literary Police
Do a search on “read,green,blue” for amusing results.
Endlessly fascinating for sure.
You’re great, but I think you misinterpret the results (and flatter yourself) if you think fornicating is ONLY 8 times more popular than you are. As good as your writing is, people spend a lot more time on that other thing, or at least spend a lot of time trying to spend more time on that other thing. I’d argue it’s more popular than just about anything else, and certainly better known.
I suspect that by the time you’re finding those people who consult Google on fornication, rather than the time-proven trial-and-error method, you’ve already cut yourself down to a very small subset.
try ‘nietzsche,locke,hegel,kant,descartes,francis bacon, any rand’
kant is by far the most popular . . .
try ‘Origin of Species, Harry Potter, bible’
The origin of species fares pretty well . . .
Try using Bible instead of bible and see the difference.
Last time I looked, Google was case insensitive. As for bible being capitalized, that has to do with the notion that it’s a book, in which case it should be italicized as well. However, the bible is a compendium of books. One might compare it to an encyclopedia. One does not speak of the “Encyclopedia.” Not that there’s anything bad about capitalizing it. If you look at books written in the early 18th Century, you find all nouns capitalized, just like in modern German. Now we only capitalize “proper” nouns, which opens up a whole other can of worms….
Shocking: Twitter’s popularity peaked over a hundred years ago! Stop the presses! Alert the President! Tweet about it!
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=twitter&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
I guess how things look depends on one’s perspective. When I ran the Ngram against Cringley it was at first over the default time period. Zero until the 1990′s when Bob exploded on the scene. In the literary world Bob is a late bloomer or a flash. Then I tightened the time frame and was able to reproduce Bob’s chart. The solution is clear — write another book. I’ll let you pick the subject.
Bob
Considering your peak – maybe it wasn’t you but Crissy!
@LinkTiger
Change twitter to Twitter and the range to 1800 to 2010.
and you get the expected result
Statistics…
This so, so depends on the corpus of books included and will, no doubt, change greatly in the future.
As to the read, blue, green… try blue,red,green instead so it’s color-coordinated.
Not sure how to enter phrases or even names… Woodrow Wilson, ‘Woodrow Wilson’, “Woodrow Wilson” for 1890 to 1940, shows nothing.
Also wish, just wish, they’d let us change the y-axis!! That’s deceptive, too!
But all you entered was “Cringely.” Maybe that’s not the right Cringely?
I wonder why Ophelia was so common back in late 20′s/early 30′s?
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=ophelia&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
[...] has a new… toy? erm… research tool up. I saw it mentioned on I, Cringley yesterday and played with it a bit last [...]
well, one forecast seems evident: Ngram will NOT be ready and USEFUL for 2011 (or 2012, 13, 14 or 15 either….)
and sorry, but how about this: did you search also for Cringley, Cringly or Cringeley?
Am I the only one who can’t READ those charts? They’re so blurred I can’t read the legends on the axes. If I decrease my screen resolution to make the images larger (on a MacBook 13″) it doesn’t help – it seems the screenshots themselves are too low a resolution. And yet some people at least SOUND like they can read the charts. Is there something wrong with me … ?
“and sorry, but how about this: did you search also for Cringley, Cringly or Cringeley”
LIKE +++
No there is nothing wrong with you you need to check your graphics card it may be faulty
Pity that Google’s OCR has such a hard time with the older texts. If (for example) you’re looking for first early occurrences of words in English, such as “hello”, you end up with false readings across the centuries with misreadings of the latin “bello” in italicized phrases.
I love Michael Jackson voice [*]
Awesome,I adore MJ! He was the most talented to ever sing! We will never have someone like MJ! Rest in Peace to the GREATEST!
Buy $10 Replica Designer Sunglasses with 3-day FREE SHIPPING
[...] reading Robert X. Cringely’s entertaining post in which he charts the decline of his literary popularity using Google’s book ngram viewer, I [...]
In the united kingdom, studies demonstrate that about 70% from the woman human population do not use the beats by dr dre headphones and rather straps on ill-fitting, not comfortable ones.
30 times more popular than fornicating, and 240 times as popular as me. There’s simply something wrong about that one.
Tonight I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all adidas predator x and to many people in all parts of the world, the war in Vietnam. http://www.soccers-cleats.com/ PZZ