# What we learned from 5 million books

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2011
- Runtime: 14 min
- By: TED.com
- Genres: Education, Science
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/ErezLiebermanAiden_2011X)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-NC-ND 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) (as the archive states it)
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/ia/ErezLiebermanAiden_2011X?play=1)