Google isn't claiming any such statement. It's merely providing fun statistics based on their data set. With that context, when I read a headline claiming that the statistics are "wrong," it would imply that the counts are somehow off. Maybe due to a bug in the algorithm or the like.
Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide any alternative data.
It's cheap and snobby grandstanding, ironically complete with faulty interpretations of the little data they DO present.
It should be marked "Fun statistics" with a big red label "Not representative of anything, any graph you see could be and probably is totally bogus" then.
>Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide any alternative data.
A, blame the victim and goalpost moving. Old favorites.
Why the fuck would the author need to "provide alternative data"? Google is showing statistics, that people, including journalists and scholars, take at face value.
Now they're suddenly just "fun statistics", so if they take them seriously, it's on them?
But Google is claiming such thing by calling it "trends", which the dictionary defines as "a general direction in which something is developing or changing.", if they didn't want to create such misunderstandings they would just call it "word frequency on Google books" so the biases of the data would be a lot more clear.
Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide any alternative data.
It's cheap and snobby grandstanding, ironically complete with faulty interpretations of the little data they DO present.