If you fancy yourself a bit of a word-smith, you’ll love the latest plaything to come out of Google Labs.
The Books Ngrams Viewer is a search engine that enables you to trawl the 500 billion words making up the 5.2 million digitized books in Google’s Book Search. The viewer lets you look for specific words or phrases – and here’s the fun part – it graphs the frequency of their written use over time, giving you a historical snapshot of word usage since the year 1800 and up to 2008.
Just before Xmas, I spent a fun few hours testing out the new tool and tracking down the earliest reference I could find to the term *Lord of the Rings* – way back in 1815! You can check out how I did it via the article I wrote for SiteProNews about my experience.
Happy New Year to you all!
Great idea – man this would make great link bait or a nice infographic that could pretty much be tailored to any niche.
Yes, was thinking it had some link bait potential – niche infographics is a good one!
Thank you for your guidance