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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.
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.
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
Well, except it’s obvious the write-up was really bugging him.
#DeleteChrome
Wasn’t that one of the early signs of civilization’s decay in Asimov’s Foundation universe? Scholars no longer did original research on their own; they’d just study what previous researchers had already written on a subject, and re-summarize it?
Sometimes it’s scary how prescient that dude was.
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He was not prescient. Like Orwell with 1984, he was largely documenting contemporary trends of his time, just with enough insight to extrapolate their consequences.
The literary device of Science Fiction was used to strip it the narration of the emotional attachment to real world politics, which is how SF usually works.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.