Be Careful When Using Any Google or YouTube Search Quantitative Results

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There are scattered comments criticizing the criteria (and changes in them) that Google uses to include, and especially to rank, the results of their searches. It is tempting—but risky–to use these searches to quantify trends. And we are not even sure that Google itself understands that this is happening. Given the origins of Google, and some of their early goals, we doubt that Google intentionally is trying to mislead people who use their Ngram search, though their using vague terms to describe the number of documents is highly suspicious. In any case, ethical scientific practice requires that findings are REPRODUCIBLE. In the case of the Don’t Call Us Bossy article in the Wall Street Journal (a publication that should know better), which listed the search terms, it was not possible to arrive at a set of curves that showed the first peak in the curves during the 1930s, and there was thus no basis for the authors to draw any conclusions about the trends in that time frame. The amount of bossiness in the 1930’s is not the point here; the point is that we should be very careful to validate any supposed trends beyond just what Google searches indicate.

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