The program was developed by Jon Orwant and Will Brockman and released in mid-December 2010.[1][3] It was inspired by a prototype (called "Bookworm") created by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Aiden from Harvard's Cultural Observatory and Yuan Shen from MIT and Steven Pinker.[7]
The Ngram Viewer was initially based on Google Books, but then[when?] switched to the 2009 edition of the Google Books Ngram Corpus. As of January 2016, the program can search an individual language's corpus within the 2009 or the 2012 edition. Although the latter edition has various new features, it only includes so…