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How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification



 
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How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification #1 (permalink) Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:31 am   How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification
 

Hi,

Interesting how everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification. What does it signify? Just for a laugh I put in: Gawd help us! and clocked up close on 80,000. So what? It's all too Gadarene swine-like for me.

Incidentally many of the 'hits' on Mother Google are repeated time and time again and so you don't get a true picture anyhow if, that is, you get a picture at all.

A
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How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification #2 (permalink) Mon Jan 22, 2007 11:01 am   How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification
 

Hi Alan,

Having seen the general 'counter' for an expressing googled (and previously 'dictionaried' Smile), I usually examine the first page (or, sometimes, the first two pages) of the given links more closely to determine of which origin the sites are (and to make judgement about the level of their ‘authority’ for me, subjectively).
And to see contexts in which the expression was really used.
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How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarificatio #3 (permalink) Mon Jan 22, 2007 11:12 am   How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarificatio
 

Whether for good or bad, I must say Google is one of my closest allies -- I consider it practically indispensable, to the point that I would feel really handicapped without it now!

Alan wrote:
Gadarene swine-like

I like that! One more phrase for the collection, thank you!
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How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification #4 (permalink) Mon Jan 22, 2007 14:53 pm   How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification
 

Just come across the following in some instructions for using an electric toothbrush:

After 3 minutes your Phaser timer will of ended ...

Well, did you ever?

Put that in your Google pipe and smoke it.

A
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How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification #5 (permalink) Mon Jan 22, 2007 17:38 pm   How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification
 

Hi Alan,

If you google that phrase there are no results (if you put the phrase in quotation marks which means you are checking how often that exact phrase appears on the Internet).
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of #6 (permalink) Mon Jan 22, 2007 20:24 pm   of
 

Alan wrote:
After 3 minutes your Phaser timer will of ended ...
I'd be willing to bet the farm that that sentence was written by a native speaker of English. Laughing

Seriously, though, Google isn't a god, but it is a useful tool, in my opinion. Like all tools, you need to learn how to use it and you also need to be aware of the limitations. Effective search techniques have to be learned. Simply looking at the number of search results often doesn't tell you much. But I do think it is possible to get some pretty reliable information about all kinds of English usage. You need to look at the results themselves and try to interpret and evaluate them.

For example, I googled the phrase "look forward to see" and got 225,000 results. Looking at some of the results a bit more closely tells me is that there are not only many ESL students making that very typical grammatical error but also that there are many ESL teachers talking about it online.

And if you get very few results for something, it may mean nothing more than your search technique isn't good or you used the wrong keywords... or you may of (ahem Wink) even misspelled something.

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How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification #7 (permalink) Tue Jan 23, 2007 18:12 pm   How everyone flies to Google for verification, justification and clarification
 

As usual, Alan has raised an interesting question and I very much agree with what Amy says. I also think that it is important to point out, that although we might be using Google, we try to access as many different resources as possible to find out how often a certain phrase is used. In other words, Google provides us with the tools to analyze documents. Google itself doesn't create that much content. As Amy said, using Google the right way can require some training. I've come across a website called GoogleGuide and it shows How to interpret Google search queries.
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