Google Book Search

As you probably know Google is digitizing the world’s books and putting them online, you can now search through the text of 5.2 million digitized books to see trends.

For example, here and below, is a comparison of the terms Gantt and Agile in books over time (note the search is case sensitive).

This tool is also creating opportunities for cultural studies examining words that aren’t in the dictionary, censorship and ideologies.

You can use the Google Books NGram Viewer online here. And the post in which the tool is described is here.

Gross National Happiness

Facebook has started publishing a Gross National Happiness index based on the content of status updates.

The happiest time of year?

Thanksgiving.

If you like this sort of thing, in a similar manner, Google is trying to determine financial trends from their search data.