Tuesday, May 18, 2004

(timesuck) not quite googlewhack, but...

I was reading an article that noted George W. Bush's use of "misunderestimate," I wondered about the # of webpages on Google that contained "misunderestimate" and what % of those pages also included the word "Bush". Answers: 6570 and 67.1%. If I was in a more creative name, I could try to come up with a catchy name for the 67.1%, as it basically indexes the extent to which a given word's presence on the Internet is directly connected to its association with Bush.

So, then, I tried to see if I could come up with another "word" (broadly construed, but certainly a string of letters with no spaces) that had a higher index than "misunderestimate." I tried various possibilities:

"Dubya": ~493K entries, 38.1% co-occurring with "Bush"
"Condoleezza": ~369K entries, 42.8%
"neoconservative": 155K entries, 50.3%
"Plame": 77500 entries, 57.2%

But despite these valiant efforts, I decided that nothing was going to beat Bushes malapropisms. So I tried another, and found the big winner so far:

"Subliminabable": 569 entries, 92.6%

It's hard to imagine anything that would beat this, but if you think of something, let me know.

I wondered what term of disendearment had the highest index, but I didn't get very far. However, let it be known that, of the 48000 instances of "Dipshit" on the web, a surprising and impressive 19.2% co-occur with "Bush" (as opposed to only 6.4% co-occuring with "Clinton" and 6.3% with "Kerry". Presumably Kerry's association with "dipshit" will go up as the election season continues.)

Regarding "Clinton", "Rodham" (68.3%) handily trounces "Lewinsky" (35.2%). "Rodham," however, is no match for "Broaddrick" (85.9%). Regarding "Kennedy", "Chappaquiddick" does not have some overwhelming co-occurrence rate (48.2%), although it does edge out "Zapruder" (47.2%)

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