Google as grammar or vocab tutor

goulnik
 March 01, 2008, 08:12 AM posted in General Discussion

I've seen several posts refering to the number of Google hits to discriminate between character or word choice. See Intermediate lesson DVD Ploy as an example, where changye gives useful advice to effectively use Google as a language tutor :

  • You need to be careful when using Google as a grammar tutor, because even native speakers sometimes make mistakes or use nonstandard  irregular Chinese, and there might be Chinese written by learners like us.
  • Sentences or phrases appeared at the top of the first page are not necessarily always correct.
  • You have to check the next several pages to see if you can find the same usages there. If there are many, their reliability should be high.

He concludes that 'Google certainly is a good teacher'.  I would agree that it's an amzing tool and quite useful, but I would caution further when comparing hits.

Say you search for  撒盐车 and it returns 600,000+ hits, you must know that it includes incomplete hits for 撒盐 and then 撒.  You don't normally notice it until you scroll to result page 20 or 30. 
If you want to only get exact results for the full expression, you need to go to Advanced Search and explicitely request an exact search, you will then see that the number of hits is way smaller. This is because they treat each character as a single 'word', as if they were separated by spaces.

Profile picture
windwalker
 March 01, 2008, 08:32 AM

Good post, much appreciated. 说实话，我至今没有想到这样用 Google。

Profile picture
henning
 March 01, 2008, 08:49 AM

Goulnik, easier way: Frame your request with quotation marks and Google will only look for the complete string - just like in English. It is my default way of searching for vocab.

Profile picture
goulnik
 March 01, 2008, 09:06 AM

henning, agreed, that's the other way. I just wanted to point out that we should understand what the numbers mean, as both absolute and relative will be very different.

Profile picture
rich
 March 01, 2008, 10:13 AM

Good points goulniky. When I search for anything on Google, even in Chinese, I ALWAYS put phrases I know I want the words to be together in double quotes. Even when searching for something in English, I find it much more reliable to search for something in quotes, even though Google tends to put hits with the search words closest together at the top of the search results, yet I don't like incomplete searches to get in the way. So I encourage everyone to search with quotes, especially when wanting to determine (at least to some usefulness) how common such-and-such phrase is. For example, with Goulniky's example above, I would put: Search: "撒盐车" double quotes and all. Lot of other powerful expressions you can quickly do in Google without having to go to the Advanced Search page, especially using "AND" and "OR" (excluding the quotes, all in uppercase), such as what I just did when searching for theories on the TV show Lost: Search: "Lost Theories" OR "Lost Theory"