An anonymous reader shares a blog post: It appears that when you use a year constraint on book search, the search index has dramatically constricted to the point of being, essentially, broken. Here’s an example. While writing something, I became interested in the etymology of the phrase ‘set in stone.’ Online essays seem to generally give the phrase an absurd antiquity — they talk about Hammurabi and Moses, as if it had been translated from language to language for decades. I thought that it must be more recent — possibly dating from printers working with lithography in the 19th century.
So I put it into Google Ngrams. As it often is, the results were quite surprising; about 8,700 total uses in about 8,000 different books before 2002, the majority of which are after 1985. Hammurabi is out, but lithography doesn’t look like a likely origin for widespread popularity either. That’s much more modern that I would have thought — this was not a pat phrase until the 1990s. That’s interesting, so I turned to Google Books to find the results. Of those 8,000 books published before 2002, how many show up in the Google Books search result with a date filter before 2002? Just five. Two books that have “set in stone” in their titles (and thus wouldn’t need a working full-text index), one book from 2001, and two volumes of the Congressional record. 99.95% of the books that should be returned in this search — many of which, in my experience, were generally returned four years ago or so — have vanished. Further reading: How Google Book Search Got Lost; Whatever Happened To Google Books?; and Google’s New Book Search Deals in Ideas, Not Keywords.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot