April 24, 2008

The Informational Distance Between Cities


Information Aesthetics points to an interesting visualization of the "informational" relation between cities. Two cities are "informationally" related if they are often mentioned together, so the visualization uses the number of Google results to approximate the distance:

Gdistance(w1,w2) = (#(w1)+#(w2)) / (#(w1+" and "+w2)+#(w2+" and "+w1)),
where #(w) is the number of Google search results for the query w enclosed in quotes.

This approximation could be improved by replacing "and" with "*", so that the words aren't necessarily separated by the conjunction "and". The Google distance is multiplied with the physical distance between cities to increase the connection between cities that are far away.

Among the cities that have a small "informational" distance: London and New York, Tokio and Sydney, London and Singapore City.

Another way you can use the number of Google results is to calculate the mindshare of a word or name within a domain. If you divide the number of search results for [nokia mobile phone] by the number of results for [mobile phone] you can find Nokia's Googleshare within the mobile space.
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5 comments:

  1. Philipp LenssenApril 24, 2008 at 2:34 AM

    Worth mentioning the keyword "googleshare" or "mindshare" when people want to find similar experiments.

    Here's something from a song increasing the mindshare between some of the mentioned cities:

    "In New York - Rio - Tokyo

    Or any other place you see
    You feel that dancing fantasy.
    In New York - Rio - Tokyo

    Or any other place around
    That magical big city sound."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alex ChituApril 24, 2008 at 2:38 AM

    I've updated to post with a small paragraph about Googleshare and then I noticed your comment. CenturyShare and Googleshare Map are two interesting spin-offs.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousApril 24, 2008 at 3:42 AM

    On this same topic, you might be interested in this paper from 2007.

    "The Google Similarity Distance"
    http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0412098

    ReplyDelete
  4. milivellaApril 25, 2008 at 12:59 AM

    Well, I can add my own links about Googleshare-like computations:
    http://zhouzhuang.livejournal.com/1458.html
    http://zhouzhuang.livejournal.com/1786.html

    Bye

    ReplyDelete
  5. atstumasSeptember 15, 2009 at 2:27 AM

    this tool is good for measuring distances:
    http://distancestool.com

    ReplyDelete

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