Like OMG

I overhear my daughter speaking on her new cellphone in the next room, and I get to thinking: OMG, does it mean "Object Management Group" or "Oh My God"? Well there is only one way to settle it: Google Fight. The results when they come in lean in the expected direction, but the results are not as overwhelming as anticipated.

So like any good data analyst I do a little exploration to check the results. I do not think that there is any problem with the Object Management Group side of the equation. On the other hand there are several potential spellings of Oh My God that could make a difference. A Quick test of "Oh Mi God" shows that it is not a problem and "Oh My God" is much more popular than the "O My God"spelling.

The next thing to test is whether the quotes are necessary. Removing the quotes quickly shows wobbly results, particularly with a big difference between O My God and Oh My God. Although curiously, the first page of O My God results from Google all show Oh My God as the search term. Google Fight shows Object Management Group winning over Oh my God but losing to O My God. My conclusion is that the quotes are necessary even although they make a less interesting Google Fight.

The other notable thing is that the numbers returned by Google Fight are not the same as the numbers returned by Google. Why? Well it is probably because they have a different setting of the advanced search options. You can spend hours over this stuff as my little example has shown. In the end the first Goggle Fight results seem to stand up, so perhaps the conclusion is that the world is more serious that I first though!