Tibet on the Google Books N-Gram Viewer

High Peaks Pure Earth has been looking at the newly released Google Books N-Gram Viewer from Google Labs. After reading two blogposts about the Viewer, one related to academic research and one related to food, we thought we'd also give it a try!

Basically the N-Gram Viewer searches through the entire Google Books database and charts the frequency of the word(s) you have entered in the search. You can compare different words and sort your search based on the corpus of books in English, Chinese or several other languages.

The graphed results then show the popularity of the word, making it easy to see trends. So here are the search results for very simple searches:

1) Instances of the word "Tibet" between 1920-2008 in English language search results:

2) Instances of the Chinese word for Tibet (西藏) between 1920-2008 in Chinese language search results:

3) Instances of the word "China" between 1920-2008 in English language search results:

Perhaps some High Peaks Pure Earth readers can provide suggestions for more complex searches or comparisons. Similarly, some more tech-literate readers might have some insights about how this all works!