Google's book database

NY Times:

With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.

The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words that are contained in books published between 1800 and 2000 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew.

The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool also allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming video game Angry Birds.

With a click you can see that “women,” in comparison with “men,” is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold. The two lines, moving in opposite directions, finally cross paths in about 1986.

You can also learn that Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe don’t get nearly as much attention in print as Jimmy Carter; compare the many more references in English than in Chinese to “Tiananmen Square” after 1989; or follow how “grilling” began a climb in the late 1990s until it outpaced “roasting,” “baking” and “frying” in 2004.

...

This is something I have been looking forward to since the data base was first discussed.

Here is a search I did on "force to space" which is a phrase I use often in discussing counterinsurgency warfare. You get a listing of books where ethe phrase is use and the page number where it occurs. This could have enormous potential for research by historians and bloggers.

For example, here is the reference in Archer Jones's The Art of War in the Western World.

You will want to save the link to this resource.