I should have thought of this before: I just googled “higher education bubble” in quotes, and got ‘About 41,000 results’. A search in google news gives five results. A year from now, that should be higher. Not a very good yardstick, but at least it’s checkable.
You’ll need the relative frequency of the phrase (per running word of news article text), not the absolute count of it. In the extreme, if the “from” date of the google news search doesn’t advance, you can only expect the number to increase :) Even if there’s a fixed time window, you can also expect more words to be generated in the next year than in the past year.
I should have thought of this before: I just googled “higher education bubble” in quotes, and got ‘About 41,000 results’. A search in google news gives five results. A year from now, that should be higher. Not a very good yardstick, but at least it’s checkable.
You’ll need the relative frequency of the phrase (per running word of news article text), not the absolute count of it. In the extreme, if the “from” date of the google news search doesn’t advance, you can only expect the number to increase :) Even if there’s a fixed time window, you can also expect more words to be generated in the next year than in the past year.
For what it’s worth, my latest search for the same phrase now results in ‘About 1,860,000 results.’