Talk:Google Books Ngram Viewer

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 9 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): HaydenMitteer.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:53, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The Dead Zone

There appears to be a dead zone between 1510 and 1515. Any ideas? Contact me at pktcmxc@stu.ccsdut.org through gmail.com.

2009

It looks like Google has added books from 2009, since there are options labled "...2009." Kdammers (talk) 07:44, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Against ipad?

on the ipad safari ngram only shows annual tallys. And the graph shows an oversized fat line which is hard to read. You would think a large company would discover hypertext. They refuse to do current news because its usefull.

Why not just ofer the service? People need to be informed.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.94.236.57 (talk) 17:58, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

multiple occurrences in the same work all count?

Does anyone know if multiple occurrences in the same work all count? So one time each in 100 books would count as the same as 100 times in a single book? Siuenti (talk) 21:48, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Good question! Did you find out? Riskit 4 a biskit (talk) 13:26, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Puzzling tag

Some results come back with a tag, 'Search for "[text]" yielded only one result.' This tag is very often attached to a graph that seems to indicate multiple results. Sometimes the word so tagged is a common one. For example, the word of gets this tag, but the, and and to don't. Can this tag pleased be explained in the artice? Koro Neil (talk) 12:16, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Why no link to n-gram?

It seems that this article should have a link to N-gram. Is there a reason that it's not referenced? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tlunsf (talk • contribs) 15:36, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Added! 92.25.42.28 (talk) 05:20, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Book title detail?

Apparently you can download the data, but can you see the occurrences by book title? I’ve looked at the download page, but it doesn’t make much sense and there’s no explanations Riskit 4 a biskit (talk) 13:29, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 3 June 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) BilledMammal (talk) 09:11, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

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Google Ngram Viewer → Google Books Ngram Viewer – The article name should be the same as the official name, i.e. "Google Books Ngram Viewer". "Google Ngram Viewer" should rather be redirected to the official name because it's a shorted version. You can see motivation behind this proposal on https://books.google.com/ngrams/, where the logo on the top includes "Books", and the title attribute of the HTML element even says "Google Books Ngram Viewer". The same is true of how the official Google account on Twitter refers to the program. Dragoniez (talk) 05:25, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

• oppose per WP:OFFICIALNAMES—blindlynx 22:59, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

  I am not convinced:

• "Google Books Ngram Viewer" - 14M hits
• "Google Ngram Viewer" - 428K hits

I believe the rename is motivated by WP:COMMONNAME. Dragoniez (talk) 01:36, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

You should have said in your initial proposal...that said raw search engine hits aren't particularly useful (see WP:GOOGLE)—blindlynx 15:41, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

@Blindlynx Sorry, I actually thought the same thing and that's my fault. Anyway, WP:OFFICIALNAMES presupposes in one way or another that the relevant alias name is more commonly used than the official name, to be chosen as the title of an article. I was aware of WP:GOOGLE but the above hit numbers at least point to a statistically unignorable gap between the two entries, and Ngrams point to the same tendency, and there are in fact quite some reliable secondary sources for "Google Books Ngram Viewer" such as [1][2][3][4]. I don't see much reason to follow the spirit of WP:OFFICIALNAMES here because "Google Ngram Viewer" is in fact inaccurate in that n-grams aren't matched with search engine hits in general but with texts in bibliographic corpora in the Google Books database. Dragoniez (talk) 18:16, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

makes sense! —blindlynx 18:23, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

• Support per nom. The proposed title is not only the official name but also appears to be the WP:COMMONNAME per Ngrams: [5]. Malerisch (talk) 05:15, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

  Ha! I just dialed up the same ngram plot on the viewer. Got the same answer, too. Arguments for the change are convincing. I'd add that "the Google Books Team" was credited on the original 2010 paper in Science describing the underlying technology. So credit where credit is due. Paugus (talk) 19:42, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

July 2024 reduced corpus selection display

See the July 2024 update to the release notes. (Note that the wayback July 30, 2024 archive copy still shows the "old" version of the release notes, it's not until the August 1, 2024 archive copy that the July 2024 update is shown).

The old selections remain available, but it requires you to manually enter the corpus id from the info page into the url. (While I understand that these extra corpus selections made things seem more complicated, I felt having the varying English-language variants provided some additional insight... so while the capability remains, this still feels like a downgrade.)

The ngram viewer provides some hint about the popularity of a word over time, which realistically has a fair amount of applicability, but the "info" page has lots more details, which I'm sure are helpful for those doing actual "research". Nonetheless, it may be worth perusing for those with sufficient interest. Fabrickator (talk) 18:52, 2 August 2024 (UTC)