To the Victor Go the Hit Counts

A dear friend and astute social observer just registered a topical hit count smackdown. The two sparring factions within a Google search are:

"liberal historian": 10,500
"conservative historian": 17,200

He concludes:

"[t]he modifier is used to signify exceptionalism. So, my counterintuitive deduction is that historians lean to the left, thus the need to attach "conservative" more often than "liberal" since perhaps to many "liberal historian" is tautological.

He then substitutes a personifying actor for an actual advocate:

"Just something to consider when one sizes up the importance of the phrase "history will judge..."

Here's my take.

Google ignores most punctuation. This means that a phrase entered as "liberal, historian" counts word ordering alone -- not context. For example:

... important news that is flying under the radar. Posted by Contrarian at 6:42 PM. Labels: Conservative, historian, Liberal, Politics, Reagan, Welcome ...

Another distortion is the numerous duplicate entries attracted by both phrases in a Google web search -- it improves for specialty collections like Google News, Images, Scholar, etc.

Finally Google has its engineering fingerprints all over this thing -- not just in terms of its Ad Sense program (READ: Advertising for Mad Millennials) but even for the interpretation of what our search intentions happen to be. Don't believe me?

I then invite him to sample the useful information folly and direct him to reference the results starting with the 4th hit.

What is Google telling us? That we're really so sold on one specific search engine to assume that Google is a definitive final word on our inquisitive behaviors -- as in everything ever written about [blank] can be found thru ...?"

On the other hand if the mission is to use Google as an unofficial sampling of the world's fleeting, cumulative curiosities then yes: I would agree that reading hit counts on Google is akin to sampling an unscientific but plausible set of survey results.

One way to accentuate the actual usefulness of Google is to use syntax to aim your query in a way that squares your intentions with its indexer. For instance, if you limit your request to primary information providers, say bloggers, you get a much smaller, controlled, and arguably credible response:

"conservative historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 316
"liberal historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 229

One should also see a dramatic reduction in dupes and landing pages for books on Amazon. Hopefully we'll also see slight drops in the number of searchers duped by Google as well.

To the Victor Go the Hit Counts

A dear friend and astute social observer just registered a topical hit count smackdown. The two sparring factions within a Google search are:

"liberal historian": 10,500
"conservative historian": 17,200

He concludes:

"[t]he modifier is used to signify exceptionalism. So, my counterintuitive deduction is that historians lean to the left, thus the need to attach "conservative" more often than "liberal" since perhaps to many "liberal historian" is tautological.

He then substitutes a personifying actor for an actual advocate:

"Just something to consider when one sizes up the importance of the phrase "history will judge..."

Here's my take.

Google ignores most punctuation. This means that a phrase entered as "liberal, historian" counts word ordering alone -- not context. For example:

... important news that is flying under the radar. Posted by Contrarian at 6:42 PM. Labels: Conservative, historian, Liberal, Politics, Reagan, Welcome ...

Another distortion is the numerous duplicate entries attracted by both phrases in a Google web search -- it improves for specialty collections like Google News, Images, Scholar, etc.

Finally Google has its engineering fingerprints all over this thing -- not just in terms of its Ad Sense program (READ: Advertising for Mad Millennials) but even for the interpretation of what our search intentions happen to be. Don't believe me?

I then invite him to sample the useful information folly and direct him to reference the results starting with the 4th hit.

What is Google telling us? That we're really so sold on one specific search engine to assume that Google is a definitive final word on our inquisitive behaviors -- as in everything ever written about [blank] can be found thru ...?"

On the other hand if the mission is to use Google as an unofficial sampling of the world's fleeting, cumulative curiosities then yes: I would agree that reading hit counts on Google is akin to sampling an unscientific but plausible set of survey results.

One way to accentuate the actual usefulness of Google is to use syntax to aim your query in a way that squares your intentions with its indexer. For instance, if you limit your request to primary information providers, say bloggers, you get a much smaller, controlled, and arguably credible response:

"conservative historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 316
"liberal historian" (inurl:blog OR inurl:blogs) = 229

One should also see a dramatic reduction in dupes and landing pages for books on Amazon. Hopefully we'll also see slight drops in the number of searchers duped by Google as well.

Forever hold your peace

Stepping up to the pre-dawn electoral line here. Think of it as a laundry-in-progress list. How does one get on it? Let's say not being mentioned once in the last two years of campaign-speak is all it takes to spill over this divide:

I will now refer to Barack Obama as the PE ("President-elect") -- you'll have to declassify the other future cast members. Afterall if you can't be presumptuous about history why bother blogging?

PE Obama:

How do you turn a new leaf without stoking the cleansing bonfire of more-than-enough eight years of non-transferable blame?

Is your prevailing coolness going over the heads of the less-temperate souls who will thwart your every move? At what point will the Move On petitions be perceived as a pile-up and less as a flooded switchboard call to action?

We're dealing with a congressional majority who owes its newfound status more to non-action than standing up. If you don't how can we stand with you?

COS Emanuel:

How do you advocate for stronger triangulation? Partisanship doomed the last show in town and the new guy in town is not exempt no matter how many seats the dems pick up tomorrow. One suggestion -- pick a fight with Harvard trustees on the tax exemption status of Big Higher Ed. That will innoculate Obama against elitism and create a smokescreen when No Child does get left behind for good.

TS Summers:

The tidal bailout waves have opened the credit spigots and that giant draining sound is beginning to sound a lot like back channel pay. Are you going to audit the funds or will the Wall Street backlash double-back these floodgates before the honeymoon is canceled?

DS Hagel:

We've outsourced our supply chain to the GOP donor base. Who's going to provide the ground-cover for our soft power displays in Kabul and Khanduhar when an underfunded FEMA calls its little Blackwater book?

VPE Biden:

How do you inherit the new fourth branch of government and assume business-as-usual has any meaning? Dismantling Cheney will make exhuming McCarthy smell like fresh disinfectant.

Forever hold your peace

Stepping up to the pre-dawn electoral line here. Think of it as a laundry-in-progress list. How does one get on it? Let's say not being mentioned once in the last two years of campaign-speak is all it takes to spill over this divide:

I will now refer to Barack Obama as the PE ("President-elect") -- you'll have to declassify the other future cast members. Afterall if you can't be presumptuous about history why bother blogging?

PE Obama:

How do you turn a new leaf without stoking the cleansing bonfire of more-than-enough eight years of non-transferable blame?

Is your prevailing coolness going over the heads of the less-temperate souls who will thwart your every move? At what point will the Move On petitions be perceived as a pile-up and less as a flooded switchboard call to action?

We're dealing with a congressional majority who owes its newfound status more to non-action than standing up. If you don't how can we stand with you?

COS Emanuel:

How do you advocate for stronger triangulation? Partisanship doomed the last show in town and the new guy in town is not exempt no matter how many seats the dems pick up tomorrow. One suggestion -- pick a fight with Harvard trustees on the tax exemption status of Big Higher Ed. That will innoculate Obama against elitism and create a smokescreen when No Child does get left behind for good.

TS Summers:

The tidal bailout waves have opened the credit spigots and that giant draining sound is beginning to sound a lot like back channel pay. Are you going to audit the funds or will the Wall Street backlash double-back these floodgates before the honeymoon is canceled?

DS Hagel:

We've outsourced our supply chain to the GOP donor base. Who's going to provide the ground-cover for our soft power displays in Kabul and Khanduhar when an underfunded FEMA calls its little Blackwater book?

VPE Biden:

How do you inherit the new fourth branch of government and assume business-as-usual has any meaning? Dismantling Cheney will make exhuming McCarthy smell like fresh disinfectant.

The Abstract Distraction

I invited an unexpected seepage of weirdness to slip into a recent Google session when I searched on:

useful information

After the first three hits (related to URL registration and possible Ad Sense spending) the next three were all about useless information -- with accompanying link. Did I get that right? I asked for useful and the Google engineers thought I meant the opposite of what I asked for?

Now I can imagine that it gets discouraging to look at query patterns all day and witness the inarticulate way how people attempt to satiate their info-hungers. I too stand witness to the fact that Google illiteracy is prevalent not only among people who hate searching but people with advanced academic degrees who never stop.

But until the national debt is closed by taxing Internet access by the minute there's little incentive to trick Google into opening the discovery door for you to pass through. Heck, I'd settle for a second-rate mind-reader if it could even identify the door someone with my curiosity passed through the last time a similar question was asked.

The pit in my stomach fills with this familiar lesson -- information is: (1) an abstraction for most, and (2) unlike other abstractions like "strategy" and "happiness" and "victory" it doesn't have an identifiable outcome or range of possibilities that enable it as a worthy achievement or desirable goal. Our best hope for information is to consider it a verb and leave the rest of it to the actions we'll take -- not on its behalf but our own.

The Abstract Distraction

I invited an unexpected seepage of weirdness to slip into a recent Google session when I searched on:

useful information

After the first three hits (related to URL registration and possible Ad Sense spending) the next three were all about useless information -- with accompanying link. Did I get that right? I asked for useful and the Google engineers thought I meant the opposite of what I asked for?

Now I can imagine that it gets discouraging to look at query patterns all day and witness the inarticulate way how people attempt to satiate their info-hungers. I too stand witness to the fact that Google illiteracy is prevalent not only among people who hate searching but people with advanced academic degrees who never stop.

But until the national debt is closed by taxing Internet access by the minute there's little incentive to trick Google into opening the discovery door for you to pass through. Heck, I'd settle for a second-rate mind-reader if it could even identify the door someone with my curiosity passed through the last time a similar question was asked.

The pit in my stomach fills with this familiar lesson -- information is: (1) an abstraction for most, and (2) unlike other abstractions like "strategy" and "happiness" and "victory" it doesn't have an identifiable outcome or range of possibilities that enable it as a worthy achievement or desirable goal. Our best hope for information is to consider it a verb and leave the rest of it to the actions we'll take -- not on its behalf but our own.

The People? Nah.

The People? No.

Since the Great Depression politicians, poets, and folkies have found their populist voice in overtures, ballads, and oratories of, by, for, and to the people -- or "the people, yes" as Carl Sandburg wrote in riffing Whitman and Ma Joad echoed in the Grapes of Wrath. Our our present official worst-since-the-Depression rhapsody we too have been quick to demonize the wealth barrons of our tines. It's not a tropical depression. It's not a foreign invader. It's a force of human nature so the benders and shapers of blame and innocence are working overtime to establish the ground rules of the new rhetoric. But the countervaling hedge against evil? It's not so simple anymore.

Even within the Bill Moyers Bastion the discussion separated "the middle class" from "workers." Can you imagine FDR parsing the flegling suburbanites of his day from the truck drivers and the janitors? In our day the dissection is complete. Look at the language of Obama. In Berlin this summer we were "a people of improbable hope." This is a level of obtuse meaning that would cause any self-respecting rabble-rouser to button up their own mute buttons. That doesn't mean Obama can't raise consciousness or crowds. But it does mean that we are long past the barricades of bifurcation.

In November 1968 the great polarizing President-elect promised to "bring us together." Even in his most unifying of moments President Obama knows what a hollow note this would sound -- to supporters and detractors alike.