What is the correct way to track the prevalence of a specific term for each year over several years? The goal is a bachelor thesis in media sciences about the trend sport "Speedminton". In order to correlate the web presence of the sport on the web with it's success (which also needs some measure I have not yet determined), I am looking for a way to be able to say e.g. "in 2003, 'Speedminton' was every millionth word on the web while in 2004 it was already every 100.000th " or "in 2003, 7000 pages mentioned speedminton while 2004 it was already 9000".
So my questions are:
- what is the best measure for "prevalence" in this context? (term frequency, number of pages)
- which sources should I use (web pages, twitter, facebook,...)
- how can I get the data?
My ideas until now were either to use Google with "Speedminton" as the search term and the exact years set in the time filter (but I don't know how exactly it works and if I should somehow correct it for the differing percentage of the whole web covered by google) or using Twitter.
