Google has become such a part of our culture that writers often quote how frequently a name or phrase appears in a Google search as an indicator of popularity. Unfortunately, more often than not, the numbers published are completely wrong.
Here are a few examples of Google hit counts being cited in publications within the past month. Before you read on, do a search for each of these yourself and see if you can figure out if they're in the ballpark or way off:
A Google search for the phrase "Iraq war" returns 3.2 million hits. -- The Raleigh News & Observer
"The best defense is a good offense." That favorite saying of heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey gets a half-million hits on Google... -- The New York Times
The phrase "geopolitical climate" is a favorite among market commentators. A Google search found 1,410 mentions of it. It makes me feel important to use it. -- The Motley Fool
A search on the Google search engine under "boycott American products" found 117,000 page hits. -- UPI
Most people, when doing searchs, fail to put their terms in quotes. Searching for Iraq War will give you more than 3 million pages, because Google is searching for any pages that have the words Iraq and War in them, in any order. Searching for "Iraq War" will give you about 635,000, because Google is only looking for the exact phrase.
Pulitzer-prize winner Bill Dedman, who runs PowerReporting.com and alerted me to The New York Times' goof listed above, points out another problem with not using quotes: Google ignores common words in most searchs.
So when The Times' William Safire searched for The best defense is a good offense, Google would have warned, "The following words are very common and were not included in your search: The is a." That means Google searched only for pages containing: defense, offense, good, best.
Here's a great example from Dedman that illlustrates this:
Try it with "to be or not to be." Just typing in the words, Google counts 451,000,000 -- but warns you that it ignored the following common words: "to" and "be." And it ignores "or" unless you capitalize it. In other words, you just searched for "not." But put the same search in quotes and you get 108,000, a better count.
Another thing to keep in mind: Google is continually surfing the Web to save the most current data, so every time you search your results may differ slightly.
You'll notice that when Google spits back the numbers, it specifically uses the word "about." So if you're going to cite Google hit numbers, you should, too.
If you guessed that all but one of the above examples were inaccurate, you're exactly right.
Rounded off, the correct estimates are:
"Iraq war" -- 635,000 (not 3.2 million)
"The best defense is a good offense" -- 6,400 (not a half-million)
"geopolitical climate" -- 1,400
"boycott American products" -- 650 (not 117,000)
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Coming Tuesday: Sree Sreenivasan
Coming next Friday: Jonathan Dube
My search for "Iraq War" returns ~ 2.26 million hits....
