Google Blogoscoped

Monday, March 12, 2007

Mapping Locations Mentioned in Books

Google engineer Matthew Gray shows off a cool piece of data visualization at the official Google Book Search blog. He mapped the mentions of locations in books, showing a world map with kind of heat zones. “The intensity of each pixel is proportional to the number of times the location at a given set of coordinates is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search,” Matthew says. A lot of books mention locations from India, Europe, and North America, apparently, as these are filled with green dots. (Google’s data set is restricted to whichever books Google scanned so far though, which might show some skew towards English-language books.)

Matthew even provides data over time by looking at book publication dates (without real zoom pictures right now, unfortunately) – it would be interesting to see this part animated.

[Image by Google.]

The Cricket World Cup in Google

Reto Meier provides you with an interesting rundown of all the places you can track the Cricket World Cup 2007 in Google applications (like Google gadgets, or Google Maps mashups). “The Cricket World Cup is one of the biggest sporting events in Australia, India, Pakistan, The West Indies,” Reto adds.

Join the ongoing cricket comments that started when Google added "/cricket/” to their robots.txt 4 days ago...

[Thanks Reto!]

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