Thoughts in a Haystack

David Gewirtz at ZDNet points to Brandon Invergo's Google search for page hits to see how many pages had the names of the three most recent U.S. Presidents and Hitler on the same page. He also did the same for the Presidents along with the names Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and even Satan.

I did a very informal search for the last three presidents' last names coupled with the last name of various dictators, both for pages and for images separately, and checked the estimated number of results. I also threw in Satan for good measure. This wasn't very careful though: searching for "bush" could certainly find results for that other George Bush (not super likely since that was before the extreme popularization of the internet) and searching for "clinton" results in, of course, many hits for Hillary. So, rather than limiting this to just presidents, we'll say that it roughly encompasses a few of the prominent US political figureheads of the past 20 years. Also, it's likely that not every hit tries to draw a direct comparison between Politico A and Dictator/Demon X. Lastly, I think Google personalizes results these days, so your exact counts may vary a bit (but probably not on the orders of magnitude that we're observing in the graphs).

It's a shame that so many people don't know they are losing their arguments.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:17 PM