Week 6, Internet Tools

So recently, I learnt about Internet Tools, with specification to

GOOGLE TOOLS!!!!!

Not all google tools, but the Google Ngram Viewer in particular. This particular Google tool aroused my interest as I have never seen it on Google's homepage before, as well as never before on the set of Google tools that are laid out below the Google search bar that we so often see. As you can see in the picture below, the list of Google tools seem horribly limited, but in actual fact, there is MORE to Google tools if one actually bothers opening up the search engine bar.

However, with respect to the other tools that I am so sure that we are all familiar with by now, I will briefly touch on their functions.

Firstly the Web tool, it is a general search engine that searches for anything in relation to the keyword that you key in the search engine bar, and would enable users to find websites that contain the keyword or information that would be related to the item that you are searching for. Google Search is a web search engine, which is Google's core product. It receives over 3 billion search queries per day. Google also offers regional search by its 189 regional level domains. 

Google Alerts – email notification service, which sends alerts based on chosen search terms, whenever there are new results. Alerts include web results, Groups results news, and video.

• Google Books (formerly Print) – search engine for the full text of printed books. Google scans and stores in its digital database. The content that is displayed depends on the arrangement with the publishers, ranging from short extracts to entire books.
• Google Custom Search – allows a user to create a customized search experience for his/her own website. Renamed from Google Co-op, which in turn replaced Google Free Search.
• Experimental Search – options for testing new interfaces while searching with Google, including Timeline views and keyboard shortcuts.
• Google Finance – searchable US business news, opinion, and financial data. Features include company-specific pages, blog search, interactive charts, executives information, discussion groups and a portfolio.
• Google Groups – web and email discussion service and Usenet archive. Users can join a group, make a group, publish posts, track their favorite topics, write a set of group web pages up datable by members and share group files. In January, 2007, version 3 of Google Groups was released. New features include the ability to create customised pages and share files.
• Google Hotel Finder - Provides searches similar to other Online Travel Agencies (Travel website) that searchers can search for check-in and check-out dates.
• Google Flight Search - a service that allows users to search for flights from many airlines to many destination, offering tools such as price comparisons and travel recommendations.
• Google Image Search – image search engine, with results based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image and text adjacent to the image. You can also make a search by uploading a picture from your computer.When searching, a thumbnail of each matching image is displayed.
• Language Tools – Collection of linguistic applications, including one that allows users to translate text or web pages from one language to another, and another that allows searching in web pages located in a specific country or written in a specific language.
• Life Search (Google China) – Search engine tailored towards everyday needs, such as train times, recipes and housing.
• Movies – specialised search engine that obtains show times of films near a user-entered location and provides reviews of films compiled from several different websites.
• Google News – automated news compilation service and search engine for news. There are versions of the aggregator for more than 20 languages. While the selection of news stories is fully automated, the sites included are selected by human editors.
• Google News archive – feature within Google News, that allows users to browse articles from over 200 years ago.
• Google Patent Search – search engine to search through millions of patents, each result with its own page, including drawings, claims and citations.
• Google Scholar – search engine for the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and scholarly fields. Today, the index includes virtually all peer-reviewed journals available online.
• Google Shopping (was Google Product Search and Froogle): price engine that searches online stores, including auctions, for products. Beginning in Fall of 2012, it will become a fully commercial product, only indexing paid listings.
• Suggest – auto-completion in search results while typing to give popular searches.
• Google Video – video search engine and online store for clips internally submitted by companies and the general public. Google's main video partnerships include agreements with CBS, NHL and the NBA. Also searches videos posted on YouTube, Metacafe, Daily Motion, and other popular video hosting sites. Google Video will no longer host video content after August 20, 2012
• Voice Local Search – non-premium phone service for searching and contacting local businesses
• Web History (was Google Search History, Personalized Search) – web page tracking, which records Google searches, Web pages, images, videos, music and more. It also includes Bookmarks, search trends and item recommendations. Google released Search History in April 2005, when it began to record browsing history, later expanding and renaming the service to Web History in April 2007.
• Knowledge Graph – a knowledge base used to enhance search results with semantic information gathered from several sources.
• Google Trader – a free online classifieds service that allows people to post or find jobs and buy or sell goods and services. Currently available in Ghana,Kenya, Uganda, Thailand and Nigeria.

However, the most important tool of the day would be the Google Ngram Viewer that I recently found out about.Google's Ngram Viewer lets you search keywords in millions of books over the span of half a millennium, a useful tool for finding trends over time. For power users, the Ngram Viewer also has advanced options, such as searching for particular keywords as specific parts of speech or combining keywords. Just in case you ever wanted to see how big cocaine was in Victorian times, now you can.

The word-search database was created by Google Books and was based originally on 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. Collectively, the corpus contained over 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese.Italian words are counted by their use in other languages. A user of the Ngram tool has the option to select among the source languages for the word-search operations.

Researchers have analyzed the Google Ngram database of books written in American or British English discovering interesting results. Amongst them, they found correlations between the emotional output and significant events in the 20th century such as World War II.

Operation and restrictions

Commas delimit user-entered search-terms, indicating each separate word or phrase to find. The Ngram Viewer returns a plotted line chart within seconds of the user pressing the Enter key or the "Search" button on the screen.

As an adjustment for more books having been published during some years, the data is normalized, as a relative level, by the number of books published in each year.

Google populated the database from over 5 million books published up to 2008. Accordingly, as of May 2012, no data will match beyond the year 2008. Due to limitations on the size of the Ngram database, only matches found in over 40 books are indexed in the database; otherwise the database could not have stored all possible combinations.Typically, search-terms cannot end with punctuation, although a separate full stop, or period, can be searched.Also, an ending question mark (as in "Why?") will cause a 2nd search for the question mark separately.

Omitting the periods in abbreviations will allow a form of matching, such as using "R M S" 

to search for "R.M.S." versus "RMS".

The Ngram also serves to be particularly useful when searching for statistics for research papers online, when accomplishing assignments that are heavily statistically based or when simply searching for numbers to back up evidence that you have found online for your research papers. 

I never knew about Ngram until today, and when I found out that it actually existed, one can only imagine how elated I felt as it was the key to solving all my inaccessible problems! 

However, less about the Ngram, here is something from my personal stash of videos as required by my module for this blogpost, edited by IMovies from my trusty old Macbook! 

Link To Video :