Using Date Specific Searches on Google Books to Disconfirm Prior Origination Knowledge Claims for Particular Terms, Words, and Names

Mike Sutton and Mark D. Griffiths
Additional contact information
Mike Sutton: Department of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, 50 Shakespeare Street, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK
Mark D. Griffiths: Department of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, 50 Shakespeare Street, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK

Social Sciences, 2018, vol. 7, issue 4, 1-9

Abstract: Back in 2004, Google Inc. (Menlo Park, CA, USA) began digitizing full texts of magazines, journals, and books dating back centuries. At present, over 25 million books have been scanned and anyone can use the service (currently called Google Books ) to search for materials free of charge (including academics of any discipline). All the books have been scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition and stored in its digital database. The present paper describes a very precise six-stage Boolean date-specific research method on Google , referred to as Internet Date Detection (IDD) for short. IDD can be used to examine countless alleged facts and myths in a systematic and verifiable way. Six examples of the IDD method in action are provided (the terms, words, and names ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘living fossil’, ‘moral panic’, ‘boredom’, and ‘selfish gene’) and each of these examples is shown to disconfirm widely accepted expert knowledge belief claims about their history of coinage, conception, and published origin. The paper also notes that Google’s autonomous deep learning AI program RankBrain has possibly caused the IDD method to no longer work so well, addresses how it might be recovered, and how such problems might be avoided in the future.

Keywords: Big Data; Internet Date Detection method; myth-busting; Google Books; database searches (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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