Archive for the ‘apollo 11’ tag

Google’s Timeline #

March 11th, 2009 | In Worth Seeing 

I’ve noticed that Google now adds to the search results of some searches a timeline of when that term is mentioned in sources — apparently a combination of newspapers, books, and websites. A few observations made using the tool:

  • Many events have peaks in ten-year anniversaries of their first happening. See for example: Hiroshima, Apollo 11.
  • Recession seems reasonably well correlated with market feelings.
  • The historical usage of some terms in interesting. Try for example, piracy and Black Friday.
  • “Apollo 13” got a definite boost when the movie came out.
  • Some terms show the tool still has bugs. Mesozoic for example. (The peak at 2000BC, for example appears to be caused by a misinterpretation of a citation.)

Obviously the validity of all of these observations is limited by my limited understanding of how the thing works and its bugs.