The astounding rise of ‘search engines’ and ‘social media,’ in 3 charts

Google Ngram, the tool that lets you chart the relative frequency of words as they appear in English and foreign literature over time, has now added support for wildcard searches. This means you can plug in a search for "bar *" and conceivably get results not just for "bar stool" but also phrases like "bar exam" and "bar none." In a moment of meta-ness, I searched for "search *_NOUN" — which will return only phrases with the word "search" followed by a noun. I expected the phrase "search engine" to appear somewhere in the results, but not nearly as prominently as it actually did. But “google search” seems to have risen above “search engine” in keyword frequency in recent years, according to the Ngram results.