Google Ngram Experiments

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/google-ngram-experiments/

by solipsist • 16 years ago

47 25 16 years ago

informationisbeautiful.net

moultano2• 16 years ago

Here's my set of them: http://moultano.blogspot.com/2010/12/history-through-google-...

I got totally addicted to this for 24 hours and couldn't do anything else. Completely amazing. I believe history now!

RickRoll5• 16 years ago

>> I believe history now!

This statement makes so little sense ...

moultano2• 16 years ago

For me this is the first time I've (indirectly) looked at primary sources. I'm no longer relying on the benevolence of some other expert, I can check the data myself!

albertsun• 16 years ago

Here's another curated set. http://ngrams.tumblr.com/

kapilkaisare• 16 years ago

Interestingly, science begins to trump religion at approximately the same time that freedom begins to trump justice.

Not that I'm complaining, but what happened during the 1920s?

nl4• 16 years ago

The modern world began.

Seriously - WW1 ended, and people began to understand the impact of technology.

Motorized and air transport, radio, Communism, womens rights and the rise to dominance of the US all were trends that were well underway in the 1920s, but were either non-existent or very rare in 1910.

RickRoll5• 16 years ago

Ppl began to understand the impact of technology in 1918? What have you been smoking? ;)

nl4• 16 years ago

My favorite thing is seeing memes that die out for various reasons.

The best example I've found is "king cotton" (the idea that European powers would intervene in the American civil war to protect their supplies of cotton): http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=king+cotton&y...

Another that compares a few and their cultural impact. Did you know that Phrenology probably had more cultural impact than UFO's did? http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Phrenology%2CSpir...

Here's a dead scientific theory: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=luminiferous&...

The success of a socio-political movement: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Woman%27s+Suffrag...

The death of Wade-Giles and rise of Pinyin for Chinese: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Peking%2CBeijing&...

srean• 16 years ago

Some older comments here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013346

Surprisingly enough I could not get a hit with k-grams of

"Almost but not quite entirely unlike tea."

But k-grams of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" worked.

zitterbewegung• 16 years ago

Most interesting one that I found was woot http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=woot&year_sta... its actually used in the 1800s

RickRoll5• 16 years ago

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=google,microsoft,...

LeBleu• 16 years ago

It is case-sensitive, try the following instead:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Google%2CMicrosof...

nitrogen• 16 years ago

I love the spate of unbalanced parentheses around 1700. Probably an OCR failure, but still amusing.

guscost2• 16 years ago

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=satan,antichrist,...

Most interesting one I could find. Jesus hates swear words, apparently.

shadowpwner• 16 years ago

Do you understand the history behind this? I didn't imagine that "fuck' was used so often.

guscost2• 16 years ago

Well, I do know that it's never meant anything but what it means today. It was probably more common in oral circulation than written down, but it probably did show up in text too. I think that the Second Great Awakening would have effectively eliminated it from print during the period the graph shows. From Wikipedia:

"Though it appeared in John Ash's 1775 A New and Complete Dictionary, listed as "low" and "vulgar," and appearing with several definitions,[10] fuck did not appear in any widely-consulted dictionary of the English language from 1795 to 1965. Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary (along with the word cunt) was in 1972. There is anecdotal evidence of its use during the American Civil War."

@tom: Ah, very interesting. OCR error would have been my second guess.

http://books.google.com/books?id=EIBIJunqzeUC&pg=PA278&#...

"War will fuck away their souls."

tomhenderson• 16 years ago

This article gives a good explanation: http://searchengineland.com/when-ocr-goes-bad-googles-ngram-...

Also interesting: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=suck%2Cfuck&y...

jeremydavid2• 16 years ago

I would love for someone to download all the data and put together lists of the most frequent 10,000 1, 2, 4, and 5 ngrams.

The datasets are just too large for my computer to handle.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/datasets

bobf• 16 years ago

What would you do with it? (I know there are lots of uses, but what's yours?)