In a Slate piece on the modesty of John Roberts, Bruce Reed does a little googling to prove a point:
No biographical profile of Roberts is complete without a few references to his famous modesty. According to Google, the word “modesty” has already appeared alongside “John Roberts” more than 18,000 times.
It’s true that googling “John Roberts” together with “modesty” yields about 18,100 hits. But I picked a few other words to run through Google that are not generally known for their association with Roberts, and this is what I found: satan — 70,900 hits; pasta — 13,900 hits; hip-hop — 150,000; French — 604,000; Social Security — 515,000; NASCAR — 74,700; and, finally, sex — 1,070,000. I don’t know exactly what it means, but it probably suggests that this Google test isn’t a very good measure of what Bruce Reed has in mind.
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