Citeren elijah wright <elw@stderr.org>:
1. Go to www.google.com 2. type in Carribean 3. Look at the light blue web bar on top of the first list of hits. It will show you the approximate number of hits: Example: "Results 1 - 10 of about 38,100,000 for caribbean"
folks realize that using the "number of hits returned on google" is a hilarious bad way to prove a point -- right?
Wrong. What's wrong with using the vast internet resources as a quasi-corpus for natural languages (if you avoid certain pitfalls, which I alluded to in my last message)? Corpora such as WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/) or Wortschatz (http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/) are also far from being perfect (aka totally unbiased).
this is like reading a student paper that says: "Merriam Webster's dictionary says that X is defined as Y. Therefore, Z.", accompanied by no further argumentation. Possibly true, but pretty hole-y logic.
I am afraid, this is how your argumentation sounds to me. Why should it be wrong to use the number of google hits under all circumstances? If I want to show that Canada is better known than Vanuatu (http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=canada&word2=vanuatu), why would the comparison of google hits be inadmissable? (There are a number of reasons, why the "Vunuatu" hits are inflated, but that is of no concern here). Thomas -- thomas koenig, ph.d. department of social sciences, loughborough university, u.k. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html