Steven Johnson had an interesting idea for using Google to calculate mindshare for a particular concept. You search for the concept, and note how many pages it returns. Then you search for the concept plus a person/company/whatever, and note how many pages that returns. Divide the second by the first, and that's your Googleshare. For example:
From which we can deduce that programming languages have 10% mindshare within the field of programming. Now let's see the mindshare within "programming languages":
Out of curiosity, I tried comparing the googleshare of men versus women, and I was surprised to find that women have a larger googleshare for politics, programming, war, and sports (all stereotypically masculine fields). In fact, it's difficult to find any area where "men" has a higher googleshare.
Posted on November 13, 2003 04:52 PM
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I do this with google news. Its a good way of finding out how much news coverage something is getting. Its also surprising sometimes to toss in something odd like "Buffy" or a band or book you like and see how far in the cultural pool it has spread.
I guess while what you are talking about is mindshare, I am talking about the 'Q' rating of something.
I know these sites are probably old news, but googleshare reminds me of Googlewhacking and the Google Zeitgeist . It's fascinating to see how Google has changed Internet usage; not only does it dazzle and entertain, but its logs are apparently becoming valuable social reflection.
Posted by: Michael Tucker at November 13, 2003 09:12 PMWhile I haven't looked into this, I'd guess women beat men here because they're the "marked" case -- i.e., when men are implicitly taken as prototypical they aren't named explicitly.
Posted by: Darius at November 14, 2003 02:14 AMAlex Martelli has been playing with this concept for a while. See:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=HJrob.386734%24R32.12803775%40news2.tin.it
for a recent thread on the subject.
Posted by: Simon Brunning at November 14, 2003 04:46 AMLet this be a lesson to you: when you invent the successor to Haskell, be sure to give it an obscure name so it will stand out in searches.
For example, a google on
bioinformatics "Common Lisp"
or
bioinformatics OCaml
is much more useful than
bioinformatics scheme
I didn't even bother trying it with C...
Just saw something like this applied to the U.S. presidential candidates: http://www.googlerace.com/. An interesting use of the Google API...
Posted by: Sanjay at November 22, 2003 01:32 PMWomen use computers more than men. And this is not a sexist remark. They just seem to have more time.
Posted by: gurugarzah at April 29, 2006 04:21 AM