Predicting Google Shutdowns. "In the following essay, I collect data on 350 Google products and look for predictive variables. I find some while modeling shutdown patterns, and make some predictions about future shutdowns. Hopefully the results are interesting, useful, or both." Gwern exhaustively analyzes Google products past and present with an eye to establishing what's not long for the bitverse. tl;dr? Results.
posted by mwhybark on May 4, 2013 - 87 comments

Does Big Data Mean The Demise Of The Expert - And Intuition? - "Data-driven decisions are poised to augment or overrule human judgment." What Is Big Data? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns on Mar 21, 2013 - 73 comments

In the recent MIT symposium "Brains, Minds and Machines," Chomsky criticized the use of purely statistical methods to understand linguistic behavior. Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig responds. (via) [more inside]
posted by nangar on May 28, 2011 - 95 comments

Google is known to ask the following question in job interviews: In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country? Think you know the answer? If so, Steve Landsburg may be willing to bet you up to $5000. [more inside]
posted by gsteff on Jan 1, 2011 - 279 comments

20.10.2010 is World Statistics Day, so help yourself to a metric (haha sorry) ton of publicly available data at UNdata, ICSPR (registration required to download data sets), and data.gov (previously). You can also explore, visualize and animate a variety of publicly available data sets with Google Labs' Public Data Explorer.
posted by cog_nate on Oct 20, 2010 - 14 comments

StateStats: Explore the popularity of search queries in U.S. states [more inside]
posted by sambosambo on Dec 4, 2008 - 40 comments

Web Authoring Statistics from Google. An analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.
posted by signal on Jan 26, 2006 - 29 comments

Google Zeitgeist charts the popularity of certain search queries on Google (via Slashdot). Of course, it'd be more interesting to track your own keywords, and you can. I stumbled across this partially hidden Google feature last night. (More inside...)
posted by waxpancake on Jul 6, 2001 - 23 comments