Worst since the Great Depression

I’ve been noticing the phrase “worse than the Great Depression” cropping up in news reports.

So, right now, there are 11 references to “worse than the Great Depression” in Google news. And 11,600 references in straight Google news.

Then there’s “worst since the great depression.” There are 53 of those in Google news and 12,500 of those in regular Google search.

This metric isn’t perfect, since the words will often be things like “the worst housing recession since the Great Depression” or “Beer sales in pubs are now at their lowest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s – down seven million pints a day from the height of the market” or “The US home foreclosure crisis has deepened to a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s…”.

All of which suggests we also watch “since the Great Depression” too. Right now, there are 2890 results for that combination in Google news and 588,000 in regular Google search.

(For fun, I tried the same searches on Cuil.com, the $33 million Google killer. I get 472,817,893 results for Great Depression. Wow! Wait a second, I get just 5,396,452 results for “great depression.” And just 330 results for “depression.” Guess Cuil hasn’t programmed the quotation mark restriction into their algorithms. Definitely the worst search results since the great depression.)