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The Google Labs N-gram Viewer is the first tool of its kind, capable of precisely and rapidly quantifying cultural trends based on massive quantities of data. It is a gateway to culturomics! The browser is designed to enable you to examine the frequency of words (banana) or phrases ('United States of America') in books over time. You'll be searching through over 5.2 million books: ~4% of all books ever published! 

Basically, if you’re going to use this corpus for scientific purposes, you’ll need to do careful controls to make sure it can support your application. Like with any other piece of evidence about the human past, the challenge with culturomic trajectories lie in their interpretation. In this paper, and in its supplementary online materials, we give many examples of controls, and of methods for interpreting trajectories.