Archive for the ‘statistics’ Category

How high is your overview?

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

I’ve was going to write something today and I wanted to use the idiom “from a 20,000 foot view”, but I was questioning whether I got the number “20,000″ right. So, I did what any self-respecting geek would do, I Googled it. Well, as I expected, different people view things from different altitudes. I searched for two phrases, “from X feet” and “X foot view”, substituting X in for increments of 10,000. Here are the number of results Google said it had for the different numbers:

Feet “from X feet” “X foot view”
10,000 46,400 24,300
20,000 24,900 1,890
30,000 81,400 22,200
40,000 11,100 692
50,000 50,400 10,600
60,000 1,020 38
70,000 65 2
80,000 93 17
90,000 35 2
100,000 1,440 83

So it looks like people are generally looking at things from 30,000 feet (but keep in mind, my analysis is only based on a 10,000 foot view of the statistics).

Posted in statistics, language, idioms, google | No Comments »