This post reminds me that “using Google to judge the popularity of things” is a good example of the problem described in the OP. Many times on the internet I’ve seen people claim that something is more or less popular/known than it really is based on a poorly formulated Google search.
Also, compared to when you last played, high-cost cards are more likely to be viable.
Many times on the internet I’ve seen people claim that something is more or less popular/known than it really is based on a poorly formulated Google search.
I’ve seen it too. Even Nate Silver did it in this New York Times blog post, where he estimates the number of fans for each team in the National Hockey League “by evaluating the number of people who searched for the term “N.H.L.”” Using his method, Montreal is the only Canadian market with a team for which it is estimated that fewer than half of the people are avid hockey fans (as he defined it).
In Montreal, French is the official language and the language spoken at home by most people.In French, the NHL is called the “Ligue nationale de hockey,” abbreviated “L.N.H.”
Many times on the internet I’ve seen people claim that something is more or less popular/known than it really is based on a poorly formulated Google search.
Web search engines aren’t really designed to deliver comparisons of popularity, anyhow; those numbers are pretty much a way of saying “look, we index a lot of stuff!” rather than an accurate count.
Systems like Google Books’ Ngram Viewerare designed to compare popularity of terms — though that one indexes over a corpus of works in print, which is not the same as the Web.
This is better, but it’s also common to get Ngram viewer wrong—eg not realizing that a word has multiple meanings which may have changed over time, or not realizing that there are two different ways to phrase the same thing, etc.
This post reminds me that “using Google to judge the popularity of things” is a good example of the problem described in the OP. Many times on the internet I’ve seen people claim that something is more or less popular/known than it really is based on a poorly formulated Google search.
Also, compared to when you last played, high-cost cards are more likely to be viable.
I’ve seen it too. Even Nate Silver did it in this New York Times blog post, where he estimates the number of fans for each team in the National Hockey League “by evaluating the number of people who searched for the term “N.H.L.”” Using his method, Montreal is the only Canadian market with a team for which it is estimated that fewer than half of the people are avid hockey fans (as he defined it).
In Montreal, French is the official language and the language spoken at home by most people.In French, the NHL is called the “Ligue nationale de hockey,” abbreviated “L.N.H.”
Web search engines aren’t really designed to deliver comparisons of popularity, anyhow; those numbers are pretty much a way of saying “look, we index a lot of stuff!” rather than an accurate count.
Systems like Google Books’ Ngram Viewer are designed to compare popularity of terms — though that one indexes over a corpus of works in print, which is not the same as the Web.
This is better, but it’s also common to get Ngram viewer wrong—eg not realizing that a word has multiple meanings which may have changed over time, or not realizing that there are two different ways to phrase the same thing, etc.