Slashdot Mirror
How Badly is Google Books Search Broken, and Why? (blogspot.com)
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.
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.
I always thought that "set in stone" refers to the condition where you have carved words into stone and they can't (easily) be undone.
Is there any other possible origin of that phrase?
However should you have gone to a library, and perhaps worked with a Librarian to help guide you in your research?
Google is a good search tool, but it isn't a research tool.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It just now thinks you didn't _mean_ what you entered.
Join the line.
that's just the fabric of reality, steadily unraveling....
I am not entirely sure what he's getting at. Can you give me something concrete?
I always get hit with the pages of interest being somehow not part of the publicly visible part.
I gave up on using google books at all because of that.
I'm rather certain that I've read the phrase in something that was written either in the 1940's or the early 1950's, and it didn't seem a unique turn of phrase in the place where I read it.
FWIW, James Joyce says, in "Portrait of the Artist"
It is peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in stone. Their
I don't know why Google didn't find that for you. OTOH, I haven't enough google-fu to use Google search to search for a range of dates.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Maybe, just maybe, Google Books is a poor choice for a tool. As big as it is, it's going to be spotty, and weighted toward more recent, digital, texts, and ones that are sufficiently available for scanning.
Better to use something that represents actual research. If English is your focus, which it seems to be given your current line of attack, it might be better to look in the full Oxford English Dictionary, readily available in and through your local library, even digitally.
Like most of its projects, Google has lost interest in Google Books and has not bothered to maintain it, much less continue developing it. This has been going for more than a decade now. NGram search for example stopped adding new texts to the index in 2008.
Google fought and won a court case to put 25 million more orphan books which it had already scanned, out of print and largely unavailable, into Google Books. But decided it wouldn't bother. Because out of print books cannot be monetized, it would seem and thus are of no interest to Alphabet, which has over $100 billion in cash on hand. Spending a few million to support Books would shave a small fraction of a percentage off the growth of its investment wealth which is unacceptable to the company that has officially retired the "Don't be evil" slogan.
At least they haven't pulled the plug on it entirely. I guess there is still some monetization to be had from in-print books.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Maybe master writing intelligible sentences before worrying about entomology. ... "How badly broken is... " reads way better than "How badly is ... broken" . Holy crap. I am a native english speaker and this whole article was tedious to read.
I just had to comment on the fact that neither Hammurabi nor Moses used English... :-P
I would probably look into German, French or even Hebrew if you want to get down history lane on the etymology... Perhaps Google Translate would be a good starting point?
People who spend money merely because it is sitting around rarely have $100 in cash on hand (much less $100 billion).
Ostrich leather ad hominem: attack not on the man, but the man's bulging pocketbook.
This is a kind of inverse Middle Ages philosophy: the assumption by the author is that anything coming far before the modern era has no relevance to scholarship, and it's "absurd" to attribute any origination of thought to something several thousand years old. Prior to a few hundred years ago, it would have been "absurd" to suggest that any phrase was recently invented rather than derived from several thousand year old classical or biblical sources.
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 would hope we're all aware that this is exactly what happened with literature in western civilization (generally the Bible and Classics), but over centuries instead of decades. Books and phrases were translated from language to language. If actual study of history is going to be replaced by what is convenient to search on Google, then we are limiting ourselves to a "history" that starts in the 20th century. Maybe this is just the way things will be in the future.
...is the translation of "set in stone" into italian. Well, maybe on the other side of the atlantic you don't have many buildings made out of stone, you jumped directly from log shacks to steel skyscrapers... But here in old Europe we know the meaning of "set in stone" and I can assure you that has nothing to do with lithography...
Try the Google Books API. I've never seen a more braindead API in my life. The documentation claims to be able to look up book information by ISBN - that thing that every single book out there has and is unique per title that could, I dunno, be used as an index into a database table. Yet, for some not insignificant number of titles, putting the ISBN in as per the API documentation returns nothing. However, use the search 'q=...' and put the ISBN string into that yields the book information you are looking for among several results.
The sequence for looking for and buying books may be it:
1. Go to Congress Library.
2. Go to computer room.
3. Look for books by author, title, year, etc.
4. Annotate the ISBN or the long title of the books.
5. Look for libraries of the city or Amazon that sell books.
6. Exit from the computer room.
7. Go to library of the city.
8. Buy books that you wanted.
9. Go to home with a happy read of your books.
Um...
cast in stone
Also, etched in stone. Definite, fixed, as in We may choose to stay longer-our plans aren't cast in stone, or When Carl sets an agenda you can safely assume it's etched in stone. Both expressions allude to sculpture, with the first, from the early 1500s, using the verb cast in the sense of pouring and hardening some material into a final form, and the second cutting or corroding a permanent design.
I would not say the mistery is solved but as they used to say where I come from: you can tell the master when you look at his tools. Just a side note - I have used duckduckgo for original search. m-w site I use for ages sometimes just out of curiosity. Language is the first most important tool of humanity. Pity that these days it gets sabotaged by PC mafia but that is another story.
It's best to cloak it in a more general change so they don't track down a specific one leading to the proximate cause incriminating them. Like Alphabet murders to hide the true victim and motive.
With this late rise of artificial stupidity, it becomes harder and harder to find /anything/ online.
google is less and less a global grep and more and more of an expert system -- double guessing (always wrong) what I'm really after based on shitty models and trends.
Someone asked me not long ago some detail about some limits in well-known piece of software; All online searches were giving just crap blog posts and other garbage; not a single source code or doc hits; in desperation, I git cloned the source, did a couple of greps and had all wrapped up in 5 minutes. After this, I wrote an answer on a Q/A -- now my crappy answer is the 1st search result everywhere, and no still no reference to primary sources, despite them being prominently linked from my answer.
I'm more interested in why the author thinks Hammurabi and Moses were just a few decades ago... Those referenced people weren't even a few centuries ago, they were a few millennia ago. Maybe the author works for Bungie and thinks 4.00 and 0.004 are the same...
The j00ish supremacists at j00gle are trying to bury the fact that white countries used to be full of whites and no one else.
This evidence must be erased in order to propagandize the mutt future that j00s seek to rule over.
It is really sad what people think is actually doing research these days. God forbid someone should get off their ass and do real research. What's next? Mistaking Wikipedia for peer-reviewed research? Millennials are so lazy!
For example I ran into a poem years ago which spoke of the fact that so any named in the Iliad are dust and gone. One part read ...but he that sang of Helen, his fingers strike and strum
though Helen's arms are dust now, and Helen's lips are dumb.
I cannot seem to find this in Google
(nor have other search engines turned up references). I suspect that a vast amount of older literature has not been digitized and thus is invisible to these search engines. It tempts me to seek out reference to tidbits I recall but don't see online, and makes me think that keeping paper volumes is not altogether redundant.
Famous but non PC poems like Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo" probably turn up, but the NMSC large identical twin study reported about 1965 on results of the NMSQT (back when it was separate fro the PSATs) seems to have been at least hidden.
I assume you searched in Google Ngram.
https://books.google.com/ngram...
If you search "set in stone", it appears that usage is a latter day idiom.
But, here is the secret to this conundrum. Language and idioms change - shift, migrate, morph - similar but slightly evolved words to express the same idea.
The inherent idea is that something is immutable, indelible, unerasable, uneditable, irrevocable. It is predicated on the idea that you can write, sketch, mockup, proof all you want and still make corrections, like hitting the preview and edit buttons on a Slashdot post, but once you hit submit, your words are eternal, just like when the stone carver finally etches the words into a stele or tombstone.
Writers write. Typographers set. Artists etch. Stone carvers carve. Through history, all such variations have been used. But since carvers carve, one might think that the classical idiom is carved in stone, with the other variations being corrupted forms based on more modern communication paradigms.
So, do what I did. Too bad I cannot post a screen capture, but you can do this yourself.
Go to Google Ngram Viewer.
Enter (copy-paste) the following line in the search box:
carved in stone,written in stone,set in stone,etched in stone
"Carved in stone" is abundant, going back well before 1800.
The other three have arisen just in recent decades.
So, prior generations used the idiom correctly. Recent generations have used analogous but technically incorrect variants.
Collectively, "written, etched, set" were originally just a tiny fraction of the whole, but recently their usage is rising. This means that current generations have either forgotten the true idiom, have gotten sloppy, or have fallen into a wave of rhetorical monkey-see monkey-do copycat-ism or fadism.
Something else interesting.
The "written, etched, set" curves are quite congruent, all showing a rapid uprise starting 1970,then an inflection circa 1990, and now topping out, with "set in stone" becoming asymptotic with or equal to "carved in stone", thus the dominant modern transmigration of the idiom. The "written, etched, set" curves are the classical sigmoidal curves of the Verhulst equation of population dynamics. These curves imply that usage of these variant terms is reaching population saturation, each term in its own camp, with non-traditional verbiage having overtaken classical verbiage.
So, Google is not broken, in fact could be a rather clever historical research tool.
https://books.google.com/ngram...
How terribly sad that the only material they have access to is the stuff Google ripped as part of their industrialised copyright infringement project.
If this goes on, he might have to actually get off his fat arse and do some work himself. Of course, it would help if he had enough brains to work out that "set in stone" probably does go back to a "absurdly" distant time when people set important text in stone - you know, like you can find in almost any ancient Greek ruin. Or that Hammurabi and Moses were more than "decades" ago, for that matter.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
In case you still care about the original question:
The German equivalent can be found in "Politische, kirchliche und literarische Zustände in Deutschland" by Franz Chassot von Florencourt, published in 1840:
"stark und unzweideutig treten die Züge wie in Stein gemeißelt hervor, und unzerstörbar für alle Ewigkeit, so sehr auch eine spätere Zeit daran herumpfuscht und den Charakter zu verwischen sucht"
"A reader shares a blog post..."
Stopped reading there.
Your blog ALWAYS sucks.
What is likely the original phrase, I remember hearing as early as my childhood in the 1950s, was "carved in stone". A equivalent phrase, most likely newer in origin, is "set in concrete". You can see the evolution. It's kinda like "irregardless".
I wonder if in earlier meanings of the phrase you might find some crossover with "lapidary."
And has been for better than five years now. Their marketing dept has long since taken over the search algorithms. The signal-to-noise ration is *waaay* down from, say, 2012. Lots of garbage results. And then there's the "REALLY STOOOPID", like the time last year I was searching for some computer-related terms (this was at work), and though I don't remember what I was serrching for, I put "those terms" in quotes, and it returned "there were no results for that exact phrase, but here are the results without quotes: AND THE FIRST OR SECOND HIT WAS THE EXACT PHRASE, *IN* *QUOTES* IN THE DOCUMENT.
It's not just they've dropped the "don't be evil", they've gone to "sell above anything, search results don't matter".
If a text is not shown, that contains the words searched for and can be seen by another means in the same database, then the search is most certainly bugged!
But internet searches have been broken since they changed them to show the maximum number of results... 8-P