Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Steven Johnson's excellent new blog (he's the author of Emergence, a book I enjoyed and learned a lot from) has proposed a new Google trick that Rael Dornfest quickly instantiated. You take the number of Google hits on a term, and the number of hits on a second term within that results set, and divide. The result is your "googleshare." To use Steve's example, there are 1,450,000 hits on "emergence" and 5,190 of those mention "Steven Johnson," giving him a .3% googleshare of the term "emergence."

You can run your own experiments using Rael's software. (You will first have to get a Google API key, a painless process.) Some top-of-the-head results:

Bush has a 7.93% share of "idiot" and 8.89% share of "moron"

Michael Jackson has a 1.24% googleshare of "freak"

Microsoft has about 3.5% share of "satan," handily beating Saddam Hussein's 0.72% share and Osama Bin Laden's 0.84% share.

Cluetrain has a 0.4% share of "hippy-dippy" and an astonishing 23.19% share of "worst book" (with the search term in quotes), while "small pieces loosely joined" (in quotes) has an astronomical 102.35% share of "worst book"!