this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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I mean, what is this chart? What are the metrics?
This is Google Ngrams, and the exact results can be found right here. It charts the frequency of a word or phrase occurring in all literature in Google's library, by publication date. You can make interesting inferences about the popularity of words. Also, try two words, phrases or names separated by a comma to compare them side by side.
It's really cool but people have stopped talking about it much since it came out years ago.
This is a neat tool! I searched for "how are you?" and got almost the same graph so I'm not sure if it's as meaningful as people think. Probably more related to casual conversations being captured in text more.
I looked at some of the examples of early 1800s use of "where are you?" and it seems to be used often as "where are you going?" (most common) or something else like for example "from where are you buying that?" etc.
Also seems like the way they process it, it doesn't just look for the immediate following question mark, the question mark can be later on.
yeah same with "who are you"
My guess would be Google scholar (or whatever their thing is called which lets you search through a bazillion indexed books and other texts)