I think what the parent means is that the derivative of the appearances is a lot more interesting than the number of appearances (and possibly as a percentage o

I think what the parent means is that the derivative of the appearances is a lot more interesting than the number of appearances (and possibly as a percentage of the total number of appearances). Google moving from 100 to 105 isn't very interesting, but a new language going from 0 to 10 mentions might be very significant. (edit: and Google owning x% and staying there isn't very interesting either) In other words, frequency of occurrence is interesting, but statistically unlikely occurrences (more or less frequent than expected) is even more interesting.