Google Ngram is a fascinating tool for language and culture research — but it's not useful for real-time trend analysis. Here's what to use instead.
Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that charts the frequency of words or phrases in a corpus of books scanned by Google — covering roughly 8 million books published between 1500 and 2019. It's a remarkable resource for linguistics, history, and cultural research. But it's frequently misunderstood as a tool for tracking consumer trends. Here's what it actually is, what it's good for, and what to use instead for real trend research.
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