For example, it says that on the TeX/LaTeX StackExchange, The TeXbook is mentioned only 6 times (https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-tex...), while in fact it's mentioned closer to 1357 times (https://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=texbook). What appears to be true is that only 6 times someone bothered to link to Amazon when mentioning the book. Worse, for the English Language & Usage site, the Oxford English Dictionary does not even show up in the results (https://bookinsider.gitlab.io/2018/12/01/top-20-books-on-eng...) while in reality it's mentioned about 7000 times by acronym (https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=oed) and about 1600 times by full name (https://english.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22oxford%20engli...).
Under what circumstances will someone add a link when mentioning a book? I can think of two:
- The user thinks the book is not sufficiently well-known, so they add a link to Amazon or some other such site, for the readers to learn more.
- The user is trying to make money off affiliate links, or whatever.
For books that are well-known, or for the typical (lazy) user like me, books are going to mentioned and discussed without any link to anywhere being added (and often by acronym or nickname). So in that sense this site is actually likely to miss all the most frequently discussed books — the ones so well-known that no one bothers to link to anything when mentioning them (as in the examples above).
Shows that the hard part of data analysis is usually data cleanup (eliminating false positives and false negatives) and normalization (this one seems to treat links to different editions on Amazon as different books).
All that said, this site is useful nevertheless; thanks for making it!