[tz] Irish Standard Time vs Irish Summer Time

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at SystematicSw.ab.ca
Sun Dec 10 16:59:45 UTC 2017


On 2017-12-10 00:21, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 12/09/2017 01:41 PM, Brian Inglis wrote:
>> Does it matter what is labelled "Standard" by politicians making points?
> 
> A bit, but what's more important is common practice among English-speakers.
> 
> For what it's worth, a Google search from UCLA today found 20 hits for the
> search '"Irish Standard Time IST" site:ie', and 9 hits for '"Irish Summer Time
> IST" site:ie'. The former hits include the Limerick Leader, the Dublin City
> Council, the Commission for Energy Regulation, and Gaelectric; the latter
> include Air Accident Investigation Unit Ireland and the School of
> Physics,Trinity College Dublin. If I change the spelling of the query to find
> more matches, '"Irish Standard Time" IST site:ie' finds 32 hits, and '"Irish
> Summer Time IST" site:ie' finds 22 hits. Another example that includes sources
> outside the Ireland top-level domain: '"Irish Standard Time" IST' has about
> 25,800 hits, and '"Irish Summer Time" IST' has about 11,100 hits. So these
> admittedly-crude Google searches suggest that "Irish Standard Time" is the
> more-common interpretation of IST in Ireland.

Did the same thing against my local google.ca site, and against google.ie for
comparison, and report the (very slightly) lower number for every query, also
including omitted results, and navigated to the last displayable page of those
to get actual matches, as estimated hits are always inflated (sometimes greatly,
as in these queries with your last quoted numbers) and may reflect all documents
with some words in the query.
Some pages discuss IST, but I see some, and assume most, of those are counted in
all queries where IST is not included in the quoted search phrase.

https://google.{ca,ie}/search?q={"Irish|Irish}+{Summer|Standard}+{Time"+IST|Time+IST"|Time+IST}[+site:ie]

base/+omitted (navigating to last displayable page to get actual matches)
 no site	site:ie		query
 72/ 425	 82/198		Irish+Summer+Time+IST
 61/ 388	 19/ 61		"Irish+Summer+Time"+IST
 55/ 322	 31/ 77		Irish+Standard+Time+IST
 55/ 312	 32/111		"Irish+Standard+Time"+IST
 53/ 399	  9/ 18		"Irish+Summer+Time+IST"
 51/ 391	 20/ 66		"Irish+Standard+Time+IST"

186/1212	110/277		Summer
161/1025	 83/254		Standard

My conclusion is that somewhat more writers in general seem to make the natural
assumption that "S" is *Summer*, as in the UK and other places where use of
/daylight saving/ is uncommon, but more writers on IE sites may know that "S" is
*Standard*, from the higher ratios of matches on the quoted phrases.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada


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