In the past decade, Google has become an indispensable part of American culture. And, much like American culture, Google is slowly but surely taking over the world — albeit while engendering far less resentment from its conquered. This is not surprising, as Google has revolutionized the way that people get information; its centralizing approach elegantly and efficiently fills needs we didn’t even know we had. Just in the past year or so, Google has introduced: Google Maps, which trounces Mapquest if only because of its lack of intrusive ads; Google Print, which allows you to search the full text of an ever-increasing number of books; and Google Scholar, which enables you to easily find research articles and, if you’re on a university network, locate them on campus (a windfall for those of us who have struggled with the Cornell Library Gateway’s cumbersome “Find Articles” feature). Google now also offers service through text messaging. I’ve never been prouder to be an American.

When it comes to the social sciences, however, Google serves an entirely different sort of purpose. While it is excellent for tracking down facts, figures, and research articles — all of which involve its capacity as a referrer to other sources of information — it also serves as a source of original information in its own right. It’s an index of nearly everything written in the public domain of the Internet, and as such it can provide information about the information that’s available — “meta-information,” if you will. Anybody who has begun a paper by citing Google statistics (“The phrase ‘I love tomatoes’ returns 9,370 search results in Google. Clearly, the tomato has become a beloved institution in the English-speaking world”) has taken advantage of this function.

No other corpus of human expression is so massive, so diverse, and so easily searchable, which is what makes Google a useful tool for social science research. One way in which it can be employed is as a method of following cultural trends and assessing values. The Google Zeitgeist tracks search requests and lists the most popular ones, as well as tracking the top “gaining queries”; results can be sorted by time period and country. The top gaining query in the U.S. this past week was “puggle” (apparently a new breed of dog that’s a cross between a pug and a beagle and for some reason costs a thousand dollars), followed by “panthers cheerleaders.” Looking internationally, South American countries seem to like Avril Lavigne while Spain favors Pamela Anderson, Russians’ top priority is “furniture,” Danes are interested in “crazy frog,” and France, that bastion of sophistication, seems to have a national obsession with (shudder) Anne Geddes.

If linguistics is more your thing, Google’s index of billions of webpages provides insight into how people across the globe use written language. A variety of academics at the Language Log, a linguistics blog, use Google to assess common usage — for example, whether people more frequently say “in the circumstances” or “under the circumstances” (under), or how often the word “guttural” is used incorrectly (pretty often).

Or maybe you’re interested in sociological research. Although Google’s applications in fields outside of language or cultural studies are less apparent, they still exist. To demonstrate, I set up a crude correlational experiment; the question I was interested in was whether name was correlated with later intelligence. More specifically, I wondered whether men who went by nicknames instead of full names were, as the stereotype suggests, likely to be dumber.

In order to do this, I selected the top ten names for baby boys in 1984, under the assumptions that A) it takes a good 20 years to establish oneself among one’s peers as dumb and B) using very common names is more likely to generate hits that refer to random people, as opposed to using a name like “Orlando” or “Keanu.” Then, for each name, I performed four Google searches: “[name] is a genius,” “[name] is an idiot,” “[nickname] is a genius,” and “[nickname] is an idiot.” (For names that had two popular nicknames, I searched for both and added the results together.) Presumably, the more hits that “John is a genius” gets compared to “John is an idiot,” the greater the percentage of Johns who have impressed others with their intelligence.

I recorded all of the numbers of GoogleHits and performed a chi-square analysis to see whether the differences were significant. The results were relatively compelling: for five of the ten names (David, Daniel, Michael, Christopher and John), nickname use had a significant (p<0.01) negative effect on genius-to-idiot ratio. The name Christopher had the most shocking results: for the full name, the genius-to-idiot ratio was almost 4.5, but for the nickname the ratio was a mere 0.66.

Since my previous column was all about journalistic abuse of statistics, I should probably add a caveat here: my findings, in addition to being based on a dubious premise, don’t tell us anything about causation. There are plenty of explanations for the results that don’t involve actual intelligence or name choice.

But, just the same, and because I knew you were wondering, here’s the ranking of names according to total (names and nicknames added together) genius-to-idiot ratio, from most genius to most idiotic: David, Robert, Michael, Daniel, Matthew, Christopher, James, Joseph, Joshua, and John.

Sorry, Johns. At least you can laugh at poor Jean and his Anne Geddes obsession.