Google Again

I’m astounded over and over again at the internet treasures that Google manages to dredge up! They really are doing some cool stuff, privacy and other concerns aside. Here’s the latest one I’ve found – the Google Books Ngram Viewer. It’s an amazing charting tool that looks through Google’s vast library of books, and reports on the relative frequency of words you put in. The minute I discovered it, I began to look through the results for some things I am interested in. I’ve so far learned:

a) That Kenya is referenced about 1.5x for every time Tanzania is referenced, but that Nairobi and Arusha are much closer to each other than I would have expected. (I think that might be almost exactly the ratio of GDP as well… connected?)

b) That in Tanzanian politics, the name “Nyerere” continues to overshadows all of his successors – Mwinyi, Mkapa, and Kikwete.

c) That the Maasai (or Masai) are one of the most defining tribes for East Africa, being referenced more than virtually any other tribe I could think to compare them against, and that “Maasai” is replacing “Masai” as the most referenced spelling.

And then on totally unrelated, but interesting (to me) notes:

d)  historically, tea has been slightly more popular than coffee, but since 1960 coffee has been ahead.

e) since 1900, we’ve been writing more and more about motorcycles (as a percentage of all words we talk about). In 1920 it was .000060%. By 1950 it was .000080. By 2000 or so we’ve shot all the way up to .000280%. Wow. That’s 2 out of every million words in English literature. =) I’m going to contribute. Motorcycle. Motorcycle. Motorcycle. Oh wait – it’s literature, not blogs. Hmm.

And with that, dear friends, I leave you to check out your own favourite words at http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/