Statistically Improbable Phrases

"Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or 'SIPs', are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements."

Amazon are just getting better and better. My only gripe is that it takes too darn long for their features to make it over the pond.

Anyway, I came across SIPs following blog linkage; the selection of SIPs for the page I landed on was rather fantastic...

Statistically Improbable in the context of both book and life in general, right now...