Methodology
Why “love”, “loved”, “lover” and “loving” are four different searches
Most search engines try to be helpful by grouping related forms of a word. That makes sense when somebody is searching the web, but it changes the answer to a vocabulary question.
If the question is “Has Eminem actually used the word lover?”, a match for love should not count. Eminem.blog therefore treats the exact term as the unit of the search. Capitalisation does not matter, but the word itself does.
This also makes future statistics more meaningful. Once the catalogue is better structured, we can compare how often individual words appear without silently merging different forms together.
What counts as an Eminem track here?
The project is intentionally broader than a normal discography. A guest verse on somebody else’s album is still part of Eminem’s vocabulary. The same logic applies to collaborations, group projects and known unreleased material.
Where a recording contains several artists, the goal is to index only the section performed by Eminem. Otherwise somebody could search a word that another rapper used and incorrectly get a “yes” answer.
Why a “no” result is not absolute
Eminem has been recording for decades, and the edges of the catalogue are difficult to define. There are alternate versions, freestyles, soundtrack appearances, guest verses and leaked recordings that are not always documented consistently.
For that reason, a negative search result means “not found in the current Eminem.blog corpus”. It does not claim that the word has never left his mouth in any recording.
What comes next
The next stage is to add better metadata to each entry — release year, project, primary artist and whether the recording is released or unreleased. That will let the same database power original statistics rather than only individual searches.
Useful future questions include which tracks have the broadest vocabulary, which words appear only once, how vocabulary changes between albums and which unusual words are unique to a particular era.