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Google Ngram Viewer: A mind reader


Most of us might not heard of some of the amazing products Google have. Among them is this app which helps to understand the views of people from the past centuries. Google Ngram Viewer, released on mid December 2010, helps to understand the outlook of a writer or some people about a thing or a subject.

This app helps in finding the importance of a person or a place or a thing about a period of time among the people by searching books from different writers (As most writers are aware of the present scenario, they will do a case study or do some fiction on a specific topic). This might be in a good sense or in a bad sense, whatever it be, this nice web application which is associated with the Google Books helps to assess people's interest from a time range.
Google Ngram Viewer is a phrase-usage graphing tool which shows the percentage of count of a phrase or a word according to some year limit as a graph. A user can chart a single phrase/word or a number of phrases seperated by commas. Also user can search from a number of corpus from the Google Books, a digitized library of books from different languages and categories from AD 1500 to this time. Google Ngram Viewer collects data from AD 1500 to AD 2008.

The Google Ngram Viewer  allows user to search from different corpus like American English, British English, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian,Russian and so on. User can input a range of years like between 1993 to 2004 or something. Another thing is the smoothing, shows the smoothing of the graph from a range of values from 0 to 50. Also a user can do an advanced search on interesting phrases by giving any mathematical expressions (add,subtract,divide,multiply) or a special corpus selection ( : ) operator for selecting the corpus. Each operators are specialised for different purposes. You can download the raw data for the searched phrases.

As I found this interesting thing while browsing for something, I searched for some of the keywords and was amazed by the resulting graph. For example I searched for 'Engineering' and the result was an inclining at the beginning and declining at the middle of the graph. I searched for Information Technology from 2007 to 2008 with a smoothing of 0 and it declined from an average percentage of 0.00018% to 0.00015% (not accurate). Google is giving the output by analysing millions of books and billions of words. Google gives an accuracy rate of 85% for English from the old and the new literature. And the accuracy rate may be different for other languages. But for sure this helps to analyse the mental, intellectual and emotional views of people from different age and time.

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