Google Data

Posted by Slav Petrov and Dipanjan Das, Research Scientists

Our book scanning effort, now in its eighth year, has put tens of millions of books online. Beyond the obvious benefits of being able to discover books and search through them, the project lets us take a step back and learn what the entire collection tells us about culture and language.

Launched in 2010 by Jon Orwant and Will Brockman, the Google Books Ngram Viewer lets you search for words and phrases over the centuries, in English, Chinese, Russian, French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Spanish. It’s become popular for both casual explorations into language usage and serious linguistic research, and this summer we decided to provide some new ways to search with it.

With our interns Jason Mann, Lu Yang, and David Zhang, we’ve added three new features. The first is wildcards: by putting an asterisk as a placeholder in your query, you can retrieve the ten most popular replacement. For instance, what noun most often follows “Queen” in English fiction? The answer is “Elizabeth”:

This graph also reveals that the frequency of mentions of the most popular queens has been decreasing steadily over time. (Language expert Ben Zimmer shows some other interesting examples in his Atlantic article.) Right-clicking collapses all of the series into a sum, allowing you to see the overall change.

Another feature we’ve added is the ability to search for inflections: different grammatical forms of the same word. (Inflections of the verb “eat” include “ate”, “eating”, “eats”, and “eaten”.) Here, we can see that the phrase “changing roles” has recently surged in popularity in English fiction, besting “change roles”, which earlier dethroned “changed roles”:

Curiously, this switching doesn’t happen when we add non-fiction into the mix: “changing roles” is persistently on top, with an odd dip in the late 1980s. As with wildcards, right-clicking collapses and expands the data:

Finally, we’ve implemented the most common feature request from our users: the ability to search for multiple capitalization styles simultaneously. Until now, searching for common capitalizations of “Mother Earth” required using a plus sign to combine ngrams (e.g., “Mother Earth + mother Earth + mother earth”), but now the case-insensitive checkbox makes it easier:

As with our other two features, right-clicking toggles whether the variants are shown.

We hope these features help you discover and share interesting trends in language use!

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

Since launching the Google Books Ngram Viewer, we’ve been overjoyed by the public reception. Co-creator Will Brockman and I hoped that the ability to track the usage of phrases across time would be of interest to professional linguists, historians, and bibliophiles. What we didn’t expect was its popularity among casual users. Since the launch in 2010, the Ngram Viewer has been used about 50 times every minute to explore how phrases have been used in books spanning the centuries. That’s over 45 million graphs created, each one a glimpse into the history of the written word. For instance, comparing flapper, hippie, and yuppie, you can see when each word peaked:

Meanwhile, Google Books reached a milestone, having scanned 20 million books. That’s approximately one-seventh of all the books published since Gutenberg invented the printing press. We’ve updated the Ngram Viewer datasets to include a lot of those new books we’ve scanned, as well as improvements our engineers made in OCR and in hammering out inconsistencies between library and publisher metadata. (We’ve kept the old dataset around for scientists pursuing empirical, replicable language experiments such as the ones Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden conducted for our Science paper.)

At Google, we’re also trying to understand the meaning behind what people write, and to do that it helps to understand grammar. Last summer Slav Petrov of Google’s Natural Language Processing group and his intern Yuri Lin (who’s since joined Google full-time) built a system that identified parts of speech—nouns, adverbs, conjunctions and so forth—for all of the words in the millions of Ngram Viewer books. Now, for instance, you can compare the verb and noun forms of “cheer” to see how the frequencies have converged over time:

Some users requested the ability to combine Ngrams, and Googler Matthew Gray generalized that notion into what we’re calling Ngram compositions: the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide Ngram counts. For instance, you can see how “record player” rose at the expense of “Victrola”:

Our info page explains all the details about this curious notion of treating phrases like components of a mathematical expression. We’re guessing they’ll only be of interest to lexicographers, but then again that’s what we thought about Ngram Viewer 1.0.

Oh, and we added Italian too, supplementing our current languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, and Russian. Buon divertimento!

Posted by Ariel Levine, Google Play Operations Specialist

Thanks to everyone who’s been a loyal reader of the Google Books Search blog over the years. As part of an effort to simplify our communications channels, we’re retiring this blog and moving on over to the official Google Inside Search Blog. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation about Google Books search there.

For those of you interested in eBooks, be sure to follow Google Play at play.google.com/+ to learn all about upcoming author Hangouts plus new content, features and releases on Google Play.

posted by Cheryl Pon, Google Books Strategist

“If you happen to have talent and are a good craftsman, you could really [make] extraordinary food with a bit of love.” – Jacques Pépin

As a child, I grew up with inspiring classic TV programs featuring chefs like Julia Child, Martin Yan, and of course, Jacques Pépin, the award-winning French chef. With great fascination, I would watch him on his hit show, Jacques Pépin: Fast Food My Way, as he prepared cuisines like sautéed rabbit with morels and pearl onions, and tartelettes aux fruits. His beautifully presented dishes were the epitome of classic French homestyle cooking with just the right amount of panache.

Pépin came to Google recently to discuss his latest book, Essential Pépin, which encompasses all the recipes from his expansive career as a French chef. Not only does the thick cookbook contain a trove of recipes, but a DVD containing techniques Pépin recommends for cooking, such as perfecting your knife technique and the best way to flip an omelette — all signature styles that are best viewed rather than read.

During his talk here, Pépin advised that rather than leave a good recipe the way it is, he wanted to keep going deeper with exploring more ways in which a recipe could improve. But although his recipes are constantly evolving, and are now quite different than they were 25 years ago due to constant improvements over the years, Pépin’s cooking techniques are the same.

From a man who turned down cooking for the Kennedys in order to cook at Howard Johnson’s, Essential Pépin is cooking through the master chef’s eyes, and preparing food with an appreciation for and a sense of aesthetics.

Check the talk out here:

Posted by Scott Dougall, director, product management, digital publishing

With the launch of Google eBooks in 2010, we introduced a multi-faceted approach to selling ebooks: online, on devices, through affiliates and through resellers. One part of that effort — the reseller program — has not gained the traction that we hoped it would, so we have made the difficult decision to discontinue it by the end of January next year.

This change will help us focus on building the best ebooks experience we can across hundreds of devices with millions of books. Books will continue to be a major content pillar alongside apps, music and movies in the Google Play store. And — regardless of where they bought them — customers will still be able to access and read their ebooks on the web, phones, tablets and compatible eReaders.

We will work closely with our sixteen reseller partners as they transition in the coming months. Also, booksellers will still be highlighted in the “Buy this book” section of Google Book search, supported with our affiliate program and have access to free Books APIs.

Looking at the results to-date, it’s clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of many readers or booksellers. While our role as an ebooks wholesaler to booksellers will be coming to a close next year, we remain as committed as ever to making the eBooks experience from Google the best it can be for readers around the world.

Posted by Anne Bartholomew, Merchandising Manager, Books on Google Play Anne Rice laid the foundations in so many ways for authors writing paranormal fiction today, and much of her early work still stands out for me as the turn-to books when it comes…

Posted by Scott Dougall, Director, Product Management

Starting today Google eBooks will be available on Google Play – a new place to experience books, music, movies, and Android apps and games, available anywhere you go. For users of our Google Book Search platform, we are excited to offer this seamless way to purchase and enjoy the eBooks you’ve discovered. With over 4 million titles, Google Play is your home for the world’s largest selection of eBooks. Beyond books, Google Play lets you store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new songs. It’s home to 450,000 Android apps and games and gives you access to thousands of your favorite movies for rent, including new releases and HD titles.

Learn more on the Official Google Blog.

Explore Google Play at play.google.com/about
Shop our store at play.google.com
Follow Google Play on Google+ to keep up on the latest news, exclusive content, and deals.

Posted by Mireya Sémelas, Google eBooks Strategist

I had the pleasure today of meeting Susan Cain when she participated in an Authors@Google event hosted at our Mountain View headquarters. Her stimulating new release Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking has made it to the top of The New York Times Bestseller list.

Before becoming an acclaimed author, Susan practiced corporate law for seven years and then worked as a negotiations consultant. Her list of clients includes well-known firms like JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, One Hundred Women in Hedge Funds and many more. However, far from being the self-confident person that her career might make her appear to be, Susan declares herself an introvert. She prefers listening to talking and reading to socializing. Watch her presentation at Google here:

In her talk, Susan said that our style as introverts or extroverts is embedded in ourselves, just like our gender; and it makes us react to stimulation in different ways. Susan said that while extroverts seek stimulation, introverts tend to react more to light, sound and and other types of stimulation, preferring less of it.

From as early as our childhood days, Susan said, we are constantly exposed to extrovert environments: playgrounds in which we are made to join in games with other kids, school classes where we have to read out loud and participate in team assignments to obtain good grades. And yet, she asserted, some children stay on their parents’ laps instead of running around with others or seek quiet spots to do their homework. This attitude accompanies us through adulthood, where we’re exposed to workplaces that promote open working spaces, teamwork and social gatherings.

Buy this Google eBook!

Susan’s book asks how introverts can cope and succeed, and suggests that we try to achieve a balance between our introvert and extrovert impulses. She points out that the most successful teams and marriages include both an introvert and extrovert. “No man is an island,” she stated, “…we need people around us.”

At the end of her talk, Susan shared with the attendees three important takeaways that resonated, personally, with me:

1. Give yourself time for quiet. Guilt-free. We’re all entitled to it.
2. Think differently about the next generation of introvert children. Solitude is a catalyst to creativity.
3. Think hard about what the essence to your great power is.  Susan joked that it might be the ability to fly, go back in time, win a wizard scholarship or even find the key to a secret garden, but whatever it is – she urges us to use that power, well and brilliantly.  

Posted by Ariel Levine, Google eBooks Associate

This one day special is now over.
Forget the chocolate and flowers this Valentine’s Day. The rush of new brooding love can be all yours with our special offer on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight eBook. Seventeen-year-old Isabella “Bella” Swan moves to a new town in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula, and her life changes completely when she meets Edward Cullen, the most attractive guy at her high school. But Edward has a deep, supernatural secret, and his love, though pure and true, threatens her very existence. The angsty affection of Twilight spawned a whole new genre of paranormal romance when it was released and the series continues to lead the bestseller lists today. Treat yourself to this guilty pleasure with the first book in the series – Twilight, today for only $2.99. This offer is good for readers within the United States and Canada, through midnight EST today, 2/14/12.

Posted by Ariel Levine, Google eBooks Associate

Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire, The Witching Hour, and Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim will be coming to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss her latest book, The Wolf Gift, on Friday, February 24th at 10AM PST. Fans around the world can get involved in this talk by submitting questions for her, and attend the talk by watching the live-stream on YouTube (see details below).

The Wolf Gift is a richly imagined story of a man turned wolf trying to figure out what his new reality means–all while trying to stay one step ahead of the people desperate to hunt him down. With this novel, Anne Rice makes an intriguing return to the gothic world her fans know and love, set this time not in her native New Orleans but along California’s haunting mist-shrouded coast. Both searching and suspenseful, it’s a gripping exploration of a man both delighted and tormented by a life he could never have anticipated.

The talk will be live streamed on the Authors@Google YouTube channel, and there will be some time for fan questions. If you’d like to submit a question for consideration please visit our Google Moderator page for the event. We look forward to you joining us as we discuss the depths of this supernatural tale.

Read The Wolf Gift: Pre-order the ebook for The Wolf Gift today from Google eBooks (available February 14) for easy reading on tablets, smartphones, e-readers and the web. The Wolf Gift is available in all of our online stores: Buy in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia or Canada!

Submit your questions for Anne Rice: Click on this Google Moderator page to submit your questions and vote on other fans’ questions. We will select some of the most popular questions to ask Anne Rice during the talk. The Google Moderator page is open from now until February 23rd, 12PM PT.

Watch the live YouTube broadcast: On Friday, February 24th, at 10AM PT, Anne Rice’s interview will be broadcast live from the Authors@Google YouTube channel, youtube.com/atgoogletalks. The talk will last 30-45 minutes. We’ll also post the recorded interview on this page afterwards.

More about Anne Rice:

• Check out her official website 
• Follow her on Twitter

Read some of her most popular books: 

• Interview with the Vampire 
• The Vampire Chronicles 
• The Witching Hour 
• Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim

Posted by Ariel Levine, Google eBooks Associate

Today marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birthday (born February 7, 1812). To celebrate the life and work of one of the world’s greatest storytellers, the Google doodle team created this fantastic celebratory doodle for our home page:

In addition, our Google Books editorial team curated a collection of free and featured Dickens classics available in the Google eBookstore in Dickens’ native land (United Kingdom) and some Commonwealth countries (Canada, Australia) as well as the US — a relatively new nation that Dickens himself visited in 1842 and 1867.

As anyone who has read a Dickens novel can attest, they are full of memorable characters, realism, humor, lyricism, and social commentary. He is considered one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian era, and responsible for some of the most iconic stories in English literature. Contemplating Dickens’ diversity of characters and themes, I wondered how the artist who created the Dickens doodle, Mike Dutton, handled the challenge.

Prior to working at Google, Mike was a freelance artist, and illustrated several children’s books, including Donovan’s Big Day. He is no stranger to making the words on a page come alive through imagery.

Mike has worked on countless doodles, some honoring other authors like Richard Scarry, and others celebrating events like the Royal Wedding and the World Cup. His favorite doodles to work on (so far!) were Mary Blair’s 100th birthday and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince).

When asked about his experience trying to represent Dickens, Mike said that it posed a greater challenge than most. “Google doodles,” he said, “are intended to be fun and delightful”; however Dickens’ work is frequently serious in tone. So I decided to focus on Dickens’ characters to bridge this gap.”

And Mike’s doodle is full of characters! We see Nell and her grandfather in the The Old Curiosity Shop, many characters from Little Dorrit, Oliver and his friends from Oliver Twist and Estella and Pip from Great Expectations. Even a certain French aristocrat graces the doodle, sitting inside the uppercase “G” — a reference to his near death by guillotine. And no tribute to Dickens would be complete without Ebenezer Scrooge and a vivid depiction of London in the background.

Mike said that while he normally works on his tablet, he had to go back to a physical drawing board for the Dickens doodle, creating each character separately so that he could place them within different parts of the Google logo. Like an engineer, he likes to iterate on what he designs until he gets it right.

When I visited his office, I also saw that like other artists, Mike immersed himself in his subject. He had Dickens’ novels stacked by his desk, as well as images from adaptations of the author’s novels pinned to his wall.

Interestingly, while a doodler’s work neither hangs in a museum nor receives the reverence of a Da Vinci or a Picasso, the illustrations are perhaps more widely and instantly viewed than any other artists’ in history. When asked about this, Mike responded:

“Sometimes I feel I got to cut in line somewhere along the artist’s journey. Being a doodler is a very fun job, but we take it seriously. Our ultimate goal is to engage and delight users, but we want to make sure we really pay proper homage to each figure along the way too.”

Mike’s doodle lets Dickens’ characters speak to the author’s impact, the way Dickens himself used them to speak his messages to the world. They are familiar, warm, and tell their sometimes harsh stories in a way that makes us want to take notice and enjoy. He uses them to successfully capture what made Dickens’ great: characters that are real to us.

Find out more about Dickens’ work and Google doodles: 

• Browse our Free and Featured Collection of Dickens’ pieces (available in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia) 
• Learn more about Google doodles

By Matt Werner, Technical Writer, Enterprise

What exactly did renowned U.S. writer and art collector Gertrude Stein mean when she said “there is no there there” about Oakland, California? In honor of Gertrude Stein’s 138th birthday today, we explore the meaning of this oft-quoted phrase.

In fall 2011, I attended the SF Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit of Stein’s groundbreaking Paris art collection. At the exhibit, a small display about her childhood in Oakland, California, sparked my interest. I was born in Oakland, and I’m currently writing a book about Oakland. I wondered what it was like for Gertrude Stein growing up there in the 1880s. I purchased The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas from the Google eBookstore to read about Stein’s experiences in Paris and San Francisco with her companion, Alice Toklas. The more I read by Stein and saw how she plays with language, the more I wondered about the meaning of her “no there there” quote.

Searching Google Books, I found the “no there there” quote on page 298 of Everybody’s Autobiography, published in 1937. The full quote is:

“…what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.”

Searching the Google News archive, I found that dozens of articles over the last several decades used her quote. Searching Google Scholar, I found over 1,000 scholarly articles referencing her quote. But still, I wanted to learn more. What was Oakland like in the 1880s? I went to the Oakland History Room at the Oakland Main Library to find out.

Stein’s family moved to Oakland in 1880, when she was six, and lived at the Tubbs Hotel their first year. Author Robert Louis Stevenson also stayed at this hotel from March to April, 1880.

Her family then moved to a home near today’s 13th Avenue and East 25th Avenue. She lived in Oakland until 1891, and left at age 17 for Baltimore, after her parents passed away. Oakland was a much smaller town then, with a population of just under 35,000 in 1880.

Nearly 45 years later, Stein returned to Oakland on a lecture tour in 1935. By that time, the city had grown nearly 10 times to over 300,000 residents. When she tried to find her childhood home, it was no longer there. When she published Everybody’s Autobiography two years later, saying there was “no there there,” it was an expression of “painful nostalgia” about her home being gone and the land around it being completely changed. The house where she grew up was on a sprawling 10-acre plot surrounded by orchards and farms. By 1935, it had been replaced by dozens of houses. Oakland held a special significance to her, and on her return, she found that Oakland had urbanized and changed from the pastoral place she remembered.

Gertrude Stein writes in her autobiographical novel, The Making of Americans, about her childhood in Oakland, where a child “could have all anybody could want of joyous sweating, of rain and wind, of hunting, of cows and dogs and horses, of chopping wood, of making hay, of dreaming, of lying in a hollow all warm with the sun shining while the wind was howling.” She won her first literary award as a student at Franklin School in Oakland for a piece she wrote about the sun “setting in a cavern of clouds.” Returning to her home decades later to find it gone and to find Oakland no longer a place “of chopping wood, of making hay” struck her, and she wrote her famous “no there there” quote in response.

When researching Stein at the Oakland History Room, the literary portrait file had photos of Jack London, a contemporary of Stein’s, who also grew up in Oakland. The file included other famous authors who visited Oakland in the late 1800s, including Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Muir. Despite the misinterpretation of Stein’s quote, there has always been a “there” in Oakland. Oakland has been blessed with several waves of artistic movements, stretching back to these authors. And in interviewing innovative artists and writers in Oakland today for my forthcoming book Oakland in Popular Memory, I’ve seen first-hand that now more than ever, there is a “there” in Oakland.

This is a guest blog post written by Graham Waldon, manager of East West Bookstore, an independent bookseller based in Mountain View, CaliforniaPeople are more important than things. That motto lies at the heart of what we believe at East West Bookstor…

Posted by Xinxing Gu, Google Books Product Manager

We’ve all been there: the Internet is suddenly down, and you can’t keep on reading your ebook to see what the character decides to do next. Or you’re about to head to the airport and want to be able to dive into a newly-purchased ebook during a long flight.

Well, here’s some much-awaited good news! Google eBooks now supports offline reading in Google Chrome. Whether you are flying through the air, backpacking through the European countryside, or simply facing intermittent network connections, you can always read your Google eBooks in your Chrome browser or on your Chromebook.

To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks.

We’re excited to make it easier for readers to access their Google eBooks on the go — whether you’re online or offline!

Posted by Oliver Chiang, Google Books Strategist

Tis the season to be… angry! We’re partnering up with Angry Birds this holiday season to bring you an early gift. In the latest adventures of your favorite furious feathered friends — Angry Birds Seasons for Chrome — the birds have locked away bonus levels in the game. Being avid readers, they’ve hidden clues to unlock the bonus levels in the new Google Books app for Chrome.

We’re not going to reveal the birds’ secret here, but read on for some hints:

First, if you haven’t already, download the Angry Birds Seasons app for Chrome. To do so, open your Chrome web browser, then download the game by going here in Chrome. (Don’t have Chrome yet? It’s a fast and free browser available for download here, with Angry Birds Seasons and Google Books app pre-installed.)

To get the bonus levels in Angry Birds Seasons, you’ll need to head over to the Google Books app to find your first clue. Open your Chrome web browser, and go here to download the Google Books app. Once you’ve installed the Books app, open it up to find out how to unlock the bonus levels in Angry Birds Seasons.