Conner

I remember when I was in high school and my teacher gave out an extra credit opportunity to anyone in his class who could find the source of a particular quotation he had. I can’t remember the exact quote anymore but I remember writing it down and having the determination to find out who it was that had said the words. My teacher claimed that he had been challenging his students to this for years and he wasn’t doing it to torture anyone; he was doing it because he legitimately could not remember where the quote was from and it was driving him crazy for years. He offered 3 full grade points to the quarterly grade of whomever could figure it out. That means someone’s grade would go from a B+ to an A- and so on. I wanted to be the one that figured it out because it was like a puzzle for me. I went to google and of course turned up nothing. For some reason, I had recently learned about a website called metacrawler.com and after google, I plugged the quote in there. And it came up. It took me 5 minutes and I got it. I emailed my teacher and I got the extra credit. Now, I wish I could say that I am some sort of incredible internet detective but I’m not. I know people that are exponentially better than me at finding info on the web (and I am talking about legal, easily accessible information). I will say, that I am better than many people at googling things but it all has to do with word choice. It is fascinating how a few words can change a search on the internet. I have been curious many times as to how google weighs the words that are searched but I know it is probably as complicated as nuclear physics. So, I got lucky and found that quote, but that day made me realize, just as many days have, how cool the internet is.

These data mining related websites are incredible. I am sure they will be useful to me in the future. And it is great that they are free. I am a little surprised that they are free.  It also makes me question how much the information from me is worth. Probably not much but it’s weird to think how data is so important to the world.

 I am sort of a cynical person so when I pulled up Google Ngram as well as the Time Magazine Corpus, I looked up two words to see what kind of frequency they had. Life and Death. My cynicism expected death to be mentioned more than life but I was immediately proven wrong. In time magazine, life has been mentioned 66686 times and death has been mentioned 31938. In Ngram, I saw that life is also mentioned more but that there is a relationship between how much life is mentioned and how much death is. When life goes up, so does death (for the most part) and so on. These tools are extremely useful to look at to better understand human nature. I hope sociologists and marketers use them to their advantage. Honestly, I hope everyone that could benefit from them use them. But I know that people would’ve killed for this sort of thing years ago.