Would it surprise you to know that Google has dedicated less and less attention to “search” over the years? Conversely, the company’s talking more about “revenue.” These, anyway, are the conclusions that one might draw using Philipp Lenssen’s Google Press Release Analyzer.
Lenssen, the resident guru at Google Blogoscoped, constructed a tool that looks over eight years’ worth of releases for the word of your choice; the Analyzer then puts together a graph showing how often the word has been used.
Yet an analogy might be appropriate at this point. When I talk about Guinness, it’s because I like it. When I talk about Coors Light, it’s because I don’t. So the fact that a word is mentioned – or even the number of times the word comes up – isn’t necessarily an indicator of how Google feels about it, but the use of Lenssen’s tool can still lead to some interesting observations.
A graph corresponding to the word “censor,” for example, only deviates from zero percent one time between 1999 and 2007. “Does this mean Google doesn’t censor?” asks Lenssen. “No, it mostly means Google in their press releases never really talked about the subject of censorship (or rather, the word ‘censorship’), nor explicitly mentioned anti-censorship tools.”
Google also hasn’t talked much about evil, its own Googleplex, or Yahoo (in recent years, at least). You’ll have to interpret them for yourself, but the Google Press Release Analyzer does a great job of bringing in some facts.
