Hopefully my picks here will generate a new thread and a new discussion. :up:
Google as a Quick 'n Dirty Corpus Tool
by Thomas Robb
...anyone can make a web page these days including non-native speakers and first graders. This would seem to make Google useless as a source for such answers—or is it?
Google can be used to derive creditable information in a number of ways:
1) Instances might be found from "impeccable sources" which would authenticate its usage.
2) We can show, by a careful selection of domains, that the frequency of occurrence of the word or phrase under scrutiny shows up with a similar relative frequency even in domains where one would expect educated usage.
3) Strength of collocation - We can demonstrate that [me] collocates with the word in question [neither], even in domains indicating educated usage.
As a corpus tool, using Google in this way has these drawbacks:
-You can only search for specific words or phrases, not word categories or inflected forms [or modified forms, such as those that are the result of ellipsis].
-There is no control over the educational level, nationality, or other characteristics of the creators of the utterances found,...
-You have no control over the registers in the "corpus".
-You cannot obtain accurate frequency statistics since there is no guarantee that the instances found are unique. In fact, duplicate hits are common.
-You cannot subsort on adjacent words nor can you generate frequency lists or a list of collocates.
On the positive side,
-It is much more accessible than any corpus.
-The database is huge compared to any existing corpus.
-The index sites include blogs and discussions, which come very close to spoken language whereas much of the data in formal corpora are from more formal written styles.
-The foregoing indicates that there are instances when Google can take the place of a specialized corpus when the main object is to identify whether a particular phrase is used or not and perhaps to indicate to what extent it is used by educated speakers or writers compared to the "general masses" of public web pages.
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Search Engine TestFurther judgment: the Google test checks popular usage, not correctness. ... will remain an extremely inconsistent tool, which does not measure notability. ...
The Google test is a useful tool. It is not perfect, nor is it the only measure ... Google/the internet is biased against American usage over other English ...
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Common Errors in English
Google gives a measure of popularity by ranking its results in order of the number of links other people have created to them.
"Foreign" language keyword research
Well I tend to favor Google Adwords suggestion tool, though any result of this kind of tools should be taken with "a pinch of salt" : they are influenced by ranking checking softwares. Dont forget your common sense then.
Also I do keyword research by frequenting the target audience. Ie if I have to search make-up related keywords, I will go in female forums and communities to have an idea of the real keywords they use.
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This one's just funny:
Using Google to write correct sentences | Antimoon Forum
I think "suggest sb to do sth" is acceptable. I searched for "suggested me to" and found 3,000 instances in sentences that were written in perfectly good English.
Can you say that 3,000 native speakers used an incorrect phrase? I'm very interested in your understanding of correctness. If the Web -- a collection of documents written by native speakers -- is a flawed source of knowledge about English, then what sort of source is acceptable?
My conclusion from the 3,000 hits is that "suggest sb to do sth" is natural enough to be used by native speakers from time to time. I think there is no reason to correct a learner who uses this phrase.
I took a closer look at the results returned by Google for a number of variations of "suggest sb to do sth", and I must admit you're right. The majority of the pages seem to have been written by non-natives. So, the phrase probably IS incorrect.
I guess this shows that using the Web to verify hypotheses about the English language is quite tricky. Thank you for investigating this. I will have to be more careful in the future!
:lol: :lol: :lol: