Some Google hits, January 1, 2003
June 14, 2003 | Edward Tufte
4 Comment(s)
The Google search tallies the number of links that result from a search of a “word” appearing on internet pages. Here are some tallies I recorded a few minutes into the New Year:
| “me” | 200,000,000 |
| “money” | 61,800,000 |
| “science” | 52,400,000 |
| “war” | 49,100,000 |
| “amazon” | 44,700,000 |
| “god” | 43,100,000 |
| “microsoft” | 41,100,000 |
| “marketing” | 33,200,000 |
| “television” | 17,500,000 |
| “truth” | 13,500,000 |
| “unemployment” | 3,350,000 |
| “inflation” | 2,830,000 |
| “happy new year” | 539,000 |
Topics: E.T.
If you ask me, there’s not enough money spent on science, and too much on war. Compare that to practically nothing for traveling the Amazon in search of God. But when it comes to Microsoft marketing on television, the truth is, they spend so much you’d think unemployment would go away, and inflation would come back. But, anyway, although I’m late, Happy New Year!
The word “Chartjunk” appears 864 times in a 6/16/2003 Google search.
The practice of “Chartjunk”, however, is a much different story!
Michael Round
This is nice. But the problem that I have with many presentations of data is the implicit idea that the data is not dynamic. For example, I checked some of these words last night, and there was less of a gap between “money” and “science”. ET, I assume that you are familiar with the Google “Zeitgeist” feature. Here is a link to their 2002 wrap-up:https://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2002.html. Still, the Zeitgeist does not keep track of the popularity of a list of words (similar to the list ET checked on Jan. 1, 2003) over a period of time.
It is nice to see the intriguing Google Zeitgeist again; there’s an earlier timeline thread about it at https://www.edwardtufte.com/100845178/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00005g&topic_id=1
But who are these people listed in Zeitgeist? Where’s Keith Jarrett? Bob Dylan? Time for the Unzeitgeist.