And now everything's clear. I don't like to be
that guy, but textranch.com is a really bad source for learning English.
First of all, this is a
search engine, not an actual living human being. It's just a few lines of code whose job is to tell you what's supposedly more commonly used in English. The only thing it takes into account is how many examples of the words
inform and
customer next to each other it can find in its database. What it does not take into account is if there are some other words after the word
customer. Here's an example provided by the website:
- Yes. Please inform Customer Service as soon as possible to confirm availability of a more suitable vehicle.
The search engine only looked at
inform and
customer; it completely ignored
service, and this is the word that makes this sentence valid.
Second, the overwhelming majority of the results textranch.com gives are actually examples of "inform customer
s", not "inform cutomer".
- Finally, make it obligatory for operators to inform customers of their roaming charges.
- There are strong requirements on the suppliers of electricity to inform customers in the contracts.
- The company will inform customers directly on the progress in this regard.
I'm honestly surprised this search engine is so bad that it gives you results with suffixes at the end of the words you're searching, especially in your case because you're trying to learn how to use articles in English, and it's essential whether the noun has an
s at the end or not (i.e., whether it's plural or singular). The programmers have probably made a
clbuttic mistake here.
You
do not need to add articles in front of
plural nouns, but you
do need to use them in front of
singular nouns (generalization for the sake of argument). What makes these sentences valid is that the word is
customers, not
cutomer.
Last but definitely not least, some of the examples are ungrammatical, straight up horrendous even. Here's one:
- We want inform customer please do not try update this interface online or use 2010 version software. if damaged, need send back for repair. We will update our version once we get newer one. Thank you.
There are so many grammatical mistakes in this example that I wonder how it got accepted into textranch.com's database. Perhaps a drunk intern was having a laugh one day?
I recommend you find a better source and stop using textranch.com.