This is possibly getting childish by now.
I noted yesterday that one ‘journalist’ was either suckered into repeating a story about there being no hits for “French Military Victories” on google, or was deliberately lying to help spread the story. It was noted in the comments section that there are in fact 91 hits for this phrase. I couldn’t tell whether that was a high or low number, because it is a slightly awkward phrase. It’s much more like a headline than a string of words that would naturally occur in text, and most of the Google corpus is text, not headings. So I thought I’d check some other countries. Just for fun. (No I’m not obsessive. This really took about two minutes. Honestly.)
Canadian Military Victories – 0 hits
Chinese Military Victories – 0 hits
Portuguese Military Victories – 0 hits
Australian Military Victories – 1 hit
Irish Military Victories – 1 hit
Macedonian Military Victories – 1 hit
English Military Victories – 3 hits
Turkish Military Victories – 3 hits
Spanish Military Victories – 5 hits
Japanese Military Victories – 7 hits
Polish Military Victories – 9 hits
Roman Military Victories – 15 hits
German Military Victories – 31 hits
American Military Victories – 44 hits
British Military Victories – 48 hits
French Military Victories – 91 hits
I think the lesson is: If America and Britain want to take out France, they better hope either Australia or Ireland are on their side rather than France’s. Or there could be a lesson about believing anything you read on the internet.
UPDATE: OK, this might be getting a little bit obsessive. But I checked through those 91 hits, and of course some of them are manifestations of the Groundskeeper Willie meme. But it looks like fewer than 43 of them are. Only 13 include the word ‘google’, for instance. At first glance it looks like by the Google test, France is the most successful military nation in history. I should either give up the Google test, or give up my argument yesterday that military might is overrated. Too much to think about!>
FURTHER UPDATE: This post is getting more attention than anything else Ive written, which is a little unfortunate, save perhaps as an illustration of how memes spread. Of course, it is by now (March 12) radically out of date, since the total number of hits for THAT PHRASE is 219. Interestingly, if you only search for pages with THAT PHRASE modified in the last three months, the total is 178, suggesting at least 41 such pages are not concerned with the latest brouhaha. And some of the 178 are also not connected to googlarious jokes, so there are almost certainly more than 48 pages that genuinely contain THE PHRASE. To be sure, most of those are tourist sites, descriptions of the Arc de Triomphe or Versaille or the like, but that all just goes to show how silly it is to use Google as a measure of military effectiveness.
I should also pause to note that my original analysis of the whole situation, that if France is so awful militarily but still important enough for Americans to obsess about, that tells us less about France and more about the relative importance of military might and diplomatic skill in determining world power, has been pretty well vindicated over the past month. For all their apparent pettiness, France is going to come out of this situation with its share of world power raised, and America has already lost an enormous share of its power. To take just one example, the probability of the Euro shortly becoming just as important a currency in the world as the dollar has been dramatically raised by the actions of the French and the American government, and this is something Americans should be seriously concerned about.
YET FURTHER UPDATE: 2 people emailed me today claiming that if you type in THE PHRASE and hit I’m feeling lucky, you get the answer that there are no hits. This simply isn’t true, though I can see why they might think it. For one thing, sometimes if you type that in and hit I’m feeling lucky, you get taken right here. I know this, because the trackback from how people got here is just that process. But I’m guessing that sometimes people got a site like this, which of course is not a Google screen, it’s just a copy of a Google screen. You can tell this by noting (a) the URL is not to google.com, and (b) it has a sitemeter tracker at the bottom of the screen! The ‘joke’ here is simply that some people reverse engineered a Google page to say something they thought was funny, and managed to work it high enough in the Google chain that sometimes it shows up, not that Google ever delivers no hits result. And not that it would matter if it did. As noted above, there are no hits for Macedonian except one for the current Macedonian army. Anyone who wants to draw conclusions about the historical ability of Macedonian armies on this basis is invited to purchase this lovely bridge I have for sale.