Technology is improving everyday, and newer ways of performing tasks are being discovered every moment all around the world. In our times, google is considered to be the ultimate authority about anything. Google is theoretically equally powerful to answer your queries on technical as well as non-technical stuff. But, always technical stuff stands apart both in quantity and quality of results. If you doubt it, type it in google and search. Anything, virtually. You will get hundreds of thousands of results for any query you make to google. But, just how popular non-technical stuff is with google in comparison to technical stuff? I decided to find out through a small experiment. The result was very evident – technical stuff was almost 8 (!) times popular than non-technical stuff. We will look at the why’s of it later, but let us look at some factual figures. How did I conduct my experiment?
I selected a few areas of work, that are comparitively hotter than others, are fairly unique and doesn't have much overlaps with each other. Now, I used google and searched for a set of most frequently used terms in each of these areas using the following simple query.
terms - (Text inside angle brackets replaced with the actual name). I literally typed it in the google search box for each of the areas I considered. For example, in case of physics, I typed 'terms physics' in the google search box and obtained a list of most frequently used terms in physics.
Then, I used these terms and searched using Google and measured the yield Google search provides. To keep things simpler, I just took a count of the results from each search. Now, I averaged all counts that resulted from terms belonging to a specific subject.
I took maximum care to select the most commonly used terms (limited by my knowledge and how I perceive their usage to be common) while searching. It was not easy doing this, because many times I found that the terms are used often in completely differing contexts – for example, galaxy is a term used in astronomy, but there are so many websites which sport the name ‘galaxy’, as well as there are clubs and resorts by this name…In such cases, I ensured that at least the first page of my search results don’t have something totally absurd… The results were as expected. The Technology domain excelled in all the 10 search terms and averaged around 2 billion, while all others averaged quarter of a billion (Astronomy and Physics being exceptions, averaged a little below ½ a billion each) Here is the ranked list of the subjects.
- Technology
- Astronomy
- Physics
- Medicine
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Evolution
- Geography
- Genetics
For more details, have a look at the attached excel…
I will follow up with another post to look into the why's of this, in a couple of days...
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