Bruce Reed, Judge Roberts, and Google
Be very suspicious of arguments that depend on the frequency of two terms appearing together on Google. Some guy named Bruce Reed recently fell into this trap in this piece on Slate:
Humble Pie: Because Washington is a city of such massive egos, the trait I admire most about John Roberts is his modesty. I just wish he’d stop bragging about it.
No biographical profile of Roberts is complete without a few references to his famous modesty. According to Google, the word “modesty” has already appeared alongside “John Roberts” more than 18,000 times. By contrast, the search engine records a grand total of 424 mentions – lifetime – for “modesty” and “Karen Hughes.”
Maybe Bush should have put Roberts in charge of winning America some friends in the world. His message is coming through loud and clear: “Trust me – I’m modest.”
Yuh-huh. I’ll let Orin Kerr run with this one for a while:
It’s true that googling “John Roberts” together with “modesty” yields about 18,100 hits. But I picked a few other words to run through Google that are not generally known for their association with Roberts, and this is what I found: satan — 70,900 hits; pasta — 13,900 hits; hip-hop — 150,000; French — 604,000; Social Security — 515,000; NASCAR — 74,700; and, finally, sex — 1,070,000. I don’t know exactly what it means, but it probably suggests that this Google test isn’t a very good measure of what Bruce Reed has in mind.
But why stop there? I thought I’d put the term “Bruce Reed” into a few searches. The search “Bruce Reed” and modesty: 123 hits. “Bruce Reed” and arrogance: 428 hits. Obviously, Bruce Reed is far more often described as arrogant than as modest. Who can deny the logic?
How about this comparison: “Bruce Reed” and intelligent yields only 712 hits. “Patterico” and intelligent yields 105,000 hits.
Google doesn’t lie, folks!
Feel free to set forth your own examples mocking Bruce Reed in the comments.
“Bruce Reed” hitler = 475 results.
“Bruce Reed” humanitarian = 340 results.
It’s true! Bruce Reed is Hitler!
Leigh (3af625) — 9/15/2005 @ 9:22 pmnk intelligent (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nk+intelligent&btnG=Google+Search) yielded about 294,000 hits. Heh.
nk (5a2f98) — 9/15/2005 @ 9:28 pm“Bruce Reed” + alive = 736 hits
“Bruce Reed” + dead = 13,300 hits
So who cares what he has to say?
The ManlyDad
Rick Wahler (b0f23e) — 9/15/2005 @ 9:45 pm“bill clinton credible” got 1 result. hmm maybe there is something to this google thing after all.
Tom Ball (71a660) — 9/15/2005 @ 10:10 pmbridge over the river kwai, greatest movie of all time: 167,000
battlefield earth, greatest movie of all time: 1,850,000
john dickinson (fc19e3) — 9/15/2005 @ 11:19 pmlew clark, sex god: 68,500.
Lew Clark (d971f3) — 9/16/2005 @ 3:11 amSeems like a pretty accurate search engine to me.
Bruce Reed Patterico:382 hits
Bruce Reed Ron Jeremy:821,000 hits
As a control
Patterico Ron Jeremy: 611 hits.
He’s obviously a pr0n star.
Veeshir (68e89d) — 9/16/2005 @ 3:49 amOne of these things might be like the other
Bruce Reed in Slate: No biographical profile of [John] Roberts is complete without a few references to his famous modesty. According to Google, the word “modesty” has already appeared alongside…
dustbury.com (5a1bcd) — 9/16/2005 @ 9:05 ammaybe there is something to this google thing after all
Michael Moore sane 240,000
Gerald A (add20f) — 9/16/2005 @ 9:08 amMichael Moore insane 466,000
This is just another example of ‘correlation is not causation’ folks.
Charles
Charles D. Quarles (5d11c1) — 9/16/2005 @ 1:10 pmThanks for the chuckles. Someone could probably get enough material for a book (or at least a “Letterman Top Ten” list) if they kept working on this.
MD in Philly (b3202e) — 9/18/2005 @ 8:38 pm