by Asim Jalis
I wrote a small program that tells you how popular a word or
phrase is on Google. It's a good way to compare different things
for Google popularity. (See the end of this post for the code.)
For example, to see how many times the words cat and dog appear
on the web, I typed: gcount.sh cat dog. Here are the results
that I got:
cat 128,000,000
dog 83,000,000
Clearly, cat-lovers dominate the web. (Another possibility is
the word cat has other meanings that people are discussing.
I was also curious to see how popular the different Myers-Briggs
personalities were on the web. So I ran gcount.sh with the
different types and got these results. Here are the results I
got:
intp 166,000
intj 80,100
infp 102,000
infj 63,000
istp 268,000
istj 48,400
isfp 30,300
isfj 23,200
entp 61,500
entj 21,400
enfp 46,900
enfj 21,500
estp 50,900
estj 37,300
esfp 22,700
esfj 17,100
It's fascinating that even though ISTPs and INTPs make up a tiny
portion of the population they are so well represented on the
web.
Of course, it is a little more complicated than that. The number
of Google hits must be a function of: (a) the number of people
writing about a type (presumably their own), (b) the number of
people familiar with MBTI and interested enough in it to talk
about it, (c) people talking about other meanings of these
acronyms.
Interestingly, the least represented group is the ESFJ followed
by the ENTJ. I wonder what's going on here.
Here is the script, in case you are interested:
for i in $* ; do
i=$(echo $i | sed 's/ /+/g')
url="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=$i" ;
echo -n "$i "
lynx -dump -nolist $url |
grep -i 'Web *Results' |
sed 's/^.* of about \([^ ]*\) for.*$/\1/'
done
To run this you must be on a Unix/Linux machine (or have Cygwin
on Windows). Paste this into a file called gcount.sh. Then invoke
it in the shell with different search arguments. E.g.
gcount.sh intp intj estp estj
