[Buddha-l] Religious violence, Buddhist violence and spelling

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 17:56 -0500, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> For those of us not as tech-savvy, how does one do a google hit-count? 
> Sounds useful.

Usually when I do a Google search, one of the pieces of information is
how many websites there are that have the term I have searched for. That
figure is called a "hit count". You mentioned some time ago that you had
disabled certain features of Google; I wonder whether the "hit count" is
something that gets filtered out of your presentation when some things
are disabled.

When I did a search for "Nietzschian" (before playfully claiming that no
one has ever used it), I saw a substantial number. But the very first
line of my Google search for "Nietzschian" was the question "Did you
mean Nietzschean?" It has been my experience that when I misspell a
word, I get asked a question of this form. For example, when I did a
search recently for "Dan Lusthaus," Dr Google asked me "Did you mean
Erik Hoogcarspel?"

Hit counts have to be used with caution. I once did a search for "George
Bush Antichrist" and got something like seventy-nine million hits. I
thought "Wow! I never realized that so many people identified George
Bush as the Antichrist!" But then I learned that Google offers a figure
based on the Boolean (which Dan would spell Boolian) OR function. So
every website on the Internet that had either "George" or "Bush" or
"Antichrist" was counted as one hit. Other search engines use other
Boolean operators. As I recall, Ask uses a conjunction, so only if
"George" and "Bush" and "Antichrist" all appeared on the same web page
would it count as a hit. So before using a hit count as any kind of
evidence, make sure you know how the search engine you are using counts
hits. Then, no matter what the answer may be, discard the evidence
anyway.

Rihcard (did you mean Richard?)