Smashed potatoes . . .

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

>Yesterday the Food Channel's Rachael Ray was discussing "smashed
>potatoes."  I assumed the phrase was just another of her many
>annoying cuteisms.
>
>However, the phrase has a whopping 1,090,000 Google hits, in
>comparison with just 1,400,000 for "mashed potatoes."


Well, not as whopping as all that. If you go to the last page of the
Google results, you'll find that the phrase actually turns up just
829 hits, or 984 if you ask Google to show "similar results" (i.e.,
additional results from the same url). This is just another example
of some well-known problems with Google's hit-count estimation
algorithm.

One way to get a better indication of the true ratio here is to add
some distractors that lower the hit counts to something more in the
range of what the algorithm can actually count. "Mashed potatoes
reply Cleveland" gets 17500 estimated hits; "smashed potatoes reply
Cleveland" gets 24.

For discussion of this and related issues, see:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001834.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001831.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001832.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000397.html

Geoff Nunberg


>

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