Fun with Google Ngrams

[rhu]

Oh, tahnan, you're not the only one who can have fun:

When did certain science terms come into play?
Facebook vs. LiveJournal (were you blogging in the 19th century?)
Nice to see which one wins but again, what's with the tech term in the 19C? Bad data tagging?
A propos of my recent question in the NYT On Language column
Something is very wrong here

Science!

Comments

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

The 'livejournal' thing seems to be some sort of mistake, but the 'google' stuff is genuine: Lots of 19^th century googling.

Science!

[danchall.myvidoop.com (from livejournal.com)]

Neat "scratch v scrap." The doubling of appearances of "scrap paper" since 1960 might have something to do with recycling.

[jadelennox]

Google books' metadata is notoriously bad. you can find librarians ranting about it if you search over the last couple of years, but the ngram viewer has made it all the more apparent.

Their OCR is pretty hideous, too, but that doesn't produce false positives in the same way, except for the funny ones like best/beft, and honestly you can't really expect OCR to do a great job on long S.

But their metadata is appalling.

(That last problem is easy, though. The dataset is case sensitive. Here, fixed it.)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

It even says "case sensitive" in bold. *Sigh*

"Follows Instructions" = "Needs Improvement"

Thanks!