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I don't know how you got those results..

for me, "incent" gets 461,000
"incent -incentivize" gets 460,000

which means there are 1000 pages which have both words

"incentivize" gets 242,000
"incentivize -incent" gets 239,000
so there are 3000 pages which have both words

at least these numbers are somewhat in the same galaxy.

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As I said Google does some very odd things. The "answers" change if you ask the same query enough times. The answers change if you ask from a different place. The answers change if you ask from a different browser. (There was another case of this on another board and there was some coordinated international experimenting done to show it.)

There was some evidence that over a certain threshold of "popularity" that misspellings and alternate forms may be counted even if you try to exclude them, but no one volunteered to page through half a million hits to verify them all. ;-)

Last edited by Myridon; 06/26/08 05:39 PM.
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Additionally, you should add the 145,000 hits for incentivise to the 242,000 hits of incentivize for 387,000.

And I'd like to subtract the ~10,000 hits relating to a product, Xactly Incent even though it's somewhat apropos. (I generally like to eliminate popular songs, movies, band names, etc. from this type of comparison as much as possible)

Another oddity...
incents only gets 34,900 hits. On the first 3 pages, 90% are misspellings for the smelly stuff (and I'm guessing the anger and the imbue with scent might also be represented).
incentivises 35,400 + incentivizes 30,700 = 66,100 and is unlikely to have been confused with another word
... so incents vs incentiviz(s)es is "estimated 35" vs 66,000?

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Flashing advertisement image deleted by admin., 9/30/08

I love this. It has all of my hated office phrases like synergy.

Skip

Last edited by Jackie; 10/01/08 02:34 AM.
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I'm sorry, skip norch, but that was a serious waste of bandwidth.

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The phrases don't look any better in a flashy spam package.

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Plus, they're harder to consider one by one and they literally waste bandwidth, both here and on the originating site by linking back to that site every time someone loads this page.

Jackie, can you delete or modify that post? If skip norch thinks it's worth the effort to transcribe all of those phrases in simple text format, fine.

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ooh, what'd I miss?!


formerly known as etaoin...
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You haven't missed anything yet. It's right up there 5 posts up.

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It looks suspiciously close to spam from some marketing firm. At least their machine is hosting it.


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