One of the unsung heroes of Google’s bevy of reference tools is the Google Books Ngram Viewer. As Google has scanned millions of dead-tree books, it’s indexed the terms referenced in them, and the ...

You may never get through all 500 billion words from more than 5 million books over five centuries. But you can find out, for instance, that "smartphone" is a lot older than you think. Lance Whitney ...

It's been nearly three years since Google rolled out its Ngram Viewer, allowing armchair historians to plot the trajectories of words and phrases over time based on an enormous corpus of data ...

Google never seems to stop surprising us with a constant stream of neat little projects that mine large datasets in interesting and unexpected ways. My topic today is yet another of these: Google’s ...

Google launched its Google Books Ngram Viewer this week, a tool that lets you research how popular words and phrases have been over several centuries, based on their appearance in books. But can you ...

Five years ago, Google unveiled a shiny new toy for nerds. The Google Ngram Viewer is seductively simple: Type in a word or phrase and out pops a chart tracking its popularity in books. Millions of ...