Google has been digitizing books. MILLIONS of books... Well, the goal is pretty much to digitize ALL books printed by humankind since the invention of the printing press. (not very ambitious. heh?)Realizing that they had a MASSIVE database of words, they put forth a search engine (because, after all, they are Google) that allows you to search the occurrence of a particular word or words through their ENTIRE books database.
You may ask "why the heck do I want to do that?!"... Elementary my dear: besides satisfying whatever geek drive you may have in you, the tool allows you to spot and compare cultural trends through time.
Google's database holds printed matter from the 1700's or earlier, so you can actually see how popular has the term "fame" (for instance) has been through centuries. By entering multiple terms separated by commas, you can compare them all in the same graph and infer some interesting cultural repercussions around that.
Click HERE to go play with Google's Ngram Viewer.
Well, if you still think it's dumb, I apologize. You can go back to watching "Jersey Shore" now...
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