Not so easy to whittle down.
Yes, it makes a certain amount of sense to run a search on "Godwin's law",
but when we get 56,500 hits, we know that we've got to focus a bit more. What's
more, I'm not looking for yet another definition, or argument about the validity
of the "law". I'm interested in finding recent references to the "law",
and the catalysts of those references. In other words, what issues cause people
to mention it today. Advanced search in Google allows us to limit our search to
pages archived in the last three months, but doing this still gives us more than
50,000 hits, and many (probably the vast majority) of these seem to have been
written well before then, and were simply (re)archived in the past three months.
So perhaps we should try to find references that are related to stories in the
news. That seems to be a good idea, but is, perhaps, a bit too obvious. After
all, doing this is pretty much a case of looking under
the lamp. Some examples:
"Godwin's law" and "Iraq" - over
9,000 hits
"Godwin's law" and "Bush" - over 12,000 hits
"Godwin's law" and Israel" - over 4,000 hits
"Godwin's law" and "Bosnia" - almost 400 hits
"Godwin's law" and "Rwanda" - almost 250 hits
Are these pages that mention the law interesting? Not really. Basically they either
argue that there is (or isn't) justified reason to compare the issue under question
to Nazism. Nobody really needs to invoke Godwin's law in order to do that.
Go to: How to lose an online argument.