I sometimes get a lot of fun just from playing around with different searches on Google and seeing what the 'Google Instant' suggestions are for auto-completion. You have to assume that the suggestions are based on what's in Google's search index, which in turn is – at least partly – based on what people write about. So it's sort of like peering into the human psyche.
The fun lies in coming up with a good three– to five word phrase which has a lot of potential variety in the auto-completion suggestions. Phrases such as 'lose weight by...':
The other fun thing is to pick pairs of phrases which are based on opposites. Men and women are a natural choice:
I typed 'who' into Google and was surprised by who appeared in the 3rd and 4th Google Instant suggestions. Two names you don't really expect to see side by side.
Google Labs have a new toy to play with, the Books Ngram Viewer. In a nutshell, Google have been scanning books. Lots of book. And by 'lots', I really mean LOTS! A million or so books have been scanned, many of which have been out of print. This new tool lets you search an index of all of the words in those books, and this allows you to see what terms have been changing in popularity over time (since 1500 AD, when admittedly very few books were published). Google, very sensibly, normalizes the results to take into account the increasing numbers of books that have been published in recent years.
By their own admission, there are many errors due to OCR problems when scanning. But I think that this just adds to the fun. After performing any search, links are provided to see the words in context in individual books. Here are a few things I've been searching for:
The rise in popularity of the iPhone
Surprisingly popular in the 1940s!
The rise (and recent fall) of various omics technologies in the last 20 years
The changing popularity of different types of nuts over the last 300 years
Are you a Mac or a PC?
The great 'shoe-rush' of the early 1940s
I'm really curious, was this war related in some way?
Everyone's favorite expletive — very big in 1700 it seems
The long battle between war and peace
Sadly, peace was last victorious in the late 1600s
The Seven Deadly Sins
Interesting that 'pride' has had three distinct peaks in usage.
Google Wave is no more. Many tech writers and bloggers will be sharpening their digital pencils, ready to write that killer article about the slow fade into obscurity of a star that once burned so brightly. Here are some suggested headlines: Not waving but drowning - an end to Google Wave
Waving goodbye - an end to Google Wave
Software giant wavers - an end to Google Wave
The wave breaks - an end to Google Wave
No longer making waves - an end to Google Wave
Software gets waved aside - an end to Google Wave
Google waves the flag of surrender - an end to Google Wave
Shockwave - an end to Google Wave
No longer on the same wavelength - an end to Google Wave
Collapse of the wave function - an end to Google Wave
Update - August 5th
Another blog has collected some real titles from articles about Google Wave and have also included a couple more of their own invention. Guess I missed some good ones.
There does seem to be somewhat of a backlash happening against facebook at the moment. This is evident from Google's auto-suggest feature. You only need to type the first four letters of the word 'delete' in order to see the following suggestion:
A similar top suggestion will appear if you start typing 'deactivate'. Alternatively, just start typing 'how do I' to see an option appear for 'how do I delete my facebook account'. More surprisingly, if you type 'how to quit', you will see 'how to quit facebook' among the top suggestions, placed above 'how to quit gambling addiction'. If we also use Google's trends service, we can see that the phrase delete facebook, is growing in prominence. Though admittedly, this might just reflect the overall growth of facebook.
Even a simple Google news search for the word 'facebook' reveals that the majority of news stories about the social media giant seem to be negative at the moment. As this CNN story illustrates, it is becoming more newsworthy when famous tech pundits such as Leo Laporte decide to wave goodbye to Mark Zuckerberg's baby. I'm curious if facebook will start up their 'damage limitation machine' again, though it is increasingly a machine that is being put to work far too frequently. Update (13th May)
Another senior tech figure (Christopher Breen, Senior Editor at Macworld) has also decided to decline to stay on facebook. Here are his reasons for doing so.
I was playing around with Google Insights for Search today and randomly decided to see how the search term bioinformatics has fared over the last six years (this is as far back as you can search for a trend). This is what I found: Initially I was quite surprised by this and so I then performed a search for genomics, only to seem the same sort of trend. According to Google the Y-axis of these graphs reflect " how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time" (emphasis on the word 'relative' is mine). This could just mean that the absolute number of search terms for 'bioinformatics' and 'genomics' is the same, or has even grown, but has been swamped by an increase in the frequency of all other search terms. To a lesser degree, there seems to be less searches occurring for many different biologically-related terms, e.g. here is the graph for the word biology.On top of the overall declining trend, I like how you can clearly see a dip in the middle of each year. Presumably this is when millions of high-school kids take their long summer vacation and are therefore not searching about anything to do with school work. You can see similar annual 'wobbles' if you also search for chemistry or physics. So does this mean that all science-related searches are declining? Well, surely there is more interest in the newer fields of biology (and bioinformatics in particular) and the related technology. This does seem to be the case. Here is the graph for the search term 'next generation sequencing'. Clearly this term has exploded in popularity as the everybody moves to doing short-read sequencing as opposed to the traditional Sanger method. So clearly, some topics are becoming hotter. However I still feel that the decline for the term bioinformatics might indeed represent a real decline in the whole field of bioinformatics. That is not to say that I think any less bioinformatics is being done these days, or that it is less 'worthy' as a field. Rather, I think bioinformatics has moved from being a specialist field that was carried out somewhat separately from 'traditional' wet-lab research, to something which is much more integrated with many other fields of research. There are still many dedicated bioinformatics group (the lab where I work is one such group), but I think it is increasingly common that more biologists need to (and want to) undertake some bioinformatics as part of their wider research. To me, bioinformatics has gone mainstream in biology and that means that it no longer makes sense to think of it as a separate field as such. Anyway, regardless of whether any particular biological term is rising or falling in popularity, I think it is more interesting to see what search terms remain eternally popular. Despite changing governments, economic turmoil, and global uncertainty what is it that we search for with any degree of constancy? My first guess seemed to be a good one. So let me end by presenting the Google Insights graph for the search term shoes.
Did Google buy out ELO or does Jeff Lynne get royalties any time someone uses Google Chrome?
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