Googleshare it is

Thanks to Gene at Atomiq for suggesting a better monicker for my Google idea. (Apparently "lexical penetration" was a little too raunchy-sounding.) So I hereby declare that "googleshare" is the official term. Recommended usages as follows:

Clay Shirky has a 5% googleshare of "social weather."

My googleshare of "lexical penetration" is 100%.

Who has a larger googleshare of "psychoanalysis" -- Lacan or Jung?

Just to make it interesting: I'll send a signed copy of Emergence to whoever comes up with the most informative googleshare analysis...

Updated 11/16, 11:30 AM: You gotta love the web. I come up with a wacky idea on Thursday, and by Saturday morning we have a great name and working code. Thanks, Rael. (Note that you need a Google API key to use Rael's form.)

Updated 11/16, 1:30 PM: Make that two versions of working code! Ed George also wrote a version, this one with a nice graph of percentages. I won't link directly to spare his Google API key from abuse, but the URL is in the comments section.

Comments

[Rael Dornfest]

Howdy,

Excuse the banality, but I had a little fun with firstname/lastname pairings:

Steven has a 7.46% googleshare of "Johnson"
Rael has a 84.21% googleshare of "Dornfest"
Willy has a 35.05% googleshare of "Wonka"

And then also a little Open Source humour:

free has a 32.94% googleshare of "beer"
free has a 32.39% googleshare of "freedom"

:-)

Rael

[edward george]

I've added some extra informational analysis about the results.

There is now a bonus meter for top-ten result matches between original search and the search within results.

ed

[Michael Jennings]

Nothing to do with Google, but it's nice to see this blog, Steven. I miss Feed. It would be nice to put all the Feed archives back on the web some time, as there is some really good stuff in them.

[Steven Johnson]

I love the dueling implementations of the googleshare concept. Very cool.

So I did a modified version of my emergence search, which I think gives a much more accurate reading -- the category is now "emergence complexity" (not in quotes in the actual query) which filters out a lot of the prosaic uses of the word "emergence." By that standard, the rankings are:

Me: 2.7%
John Holland: 4.0%
Kevin Kelly: 1.0%

I should really be third on that list, but I cheated by calling my book Emergence.

[Erik Benson]

I suspect that the whole reason you started this game is so that you'd get the most googleshare of "googleshare". Speaking of which, Google should get off its lazy butt and index this already. :)

[Steven Johnson]

Got myself my very own Google API key, and had some fun with Rael's new version. Most interesting results: George higher than Paul (guess dying helps your googleshare); Lacan so high in psychoanalytic googleshare; Raymond trouncing Stallman and Torvalds in "open source".

googleshare of "Beatles"

Lennon 10.97% McCartney 7.94%
Harrison 8.22%
Starr 3.62%

googleshare of "Psychoanalysis"

Freud 27.81%
Jung 7.02%
Lacan 6.20%
Erickson 0.97%

Googleshare of "open source"

Stallman 1.58%
Torvalds 3.42%
Raymond 7.85%
Lessig 0.45%

[Richard]

Inevitable (and possibly uninformative): "George Bush" has 3.5% of "the vote".

Almost funny: "George Bush" has grasped 3.9% of "the English Language".

[Gene]

I have no idea what this means, but here's your (Steven's) googleshare of 'emergence complexity' calculated looking at pages updated in the past 3, 6 and 12 months:

3 months: 4.5%
6 months: 3.9%
12 months: 4.2%
anytime: 2.7%

Perhaps the recent upswing is due to the launch of your blog?

[edward george]

Damn, beaten to it: i was busy making an implementation and i come back here to post about it and see the update has appeared whilst i was working.

Anyway, here it is: http://ed.suppose.co.uk/googleshare.php

please go easy on my api key!

ed

[edward george]

http://ed.suppose.co.uk/googleshare.php?as_q=stevenberlinjohnson&q=googleshare

wow...

'stevenberlinjohnson' has a 59.26% googleshare of 'googleshare'

There are 9 out of 10 top-ten result matches.
Which gives a bonus ranking of 52/55: (10 for top result, 9 for next etc...)

that's the highest scorings i've seen,

well, i artificially rigged that; using 'steven berlin johnson' rather than 'stevenberlinjohnson' get's a lot less because a lot more people use you name than your website term. infact stevenberlinjohnson.com doesn't even turn up in the top ten for 'steven berlin johnson'

anyway...

[Gene]

My last post on this (I promise): The googleshare of George Harrison/Beatles might be inflated because it's picking up George Martin references. Consider:

Googleshare of "Beatles":
George Harrison - 7%
"George Harrison" - 5.38%

George Martin - 5.51%
"George Martin" - 1.19%

Another note: in any significantly broad domain, 5% seems to be a damn good googleshare.

[Beau Lebens]

hmph - I would have thought it was much higher than that....

'Porn' has a 0.8% googleshare of 'The Internet'

[Beau Lebens]

Yoiks!

'microsoft' has a 2.12% googleshare of 'the world'