FW: is Google reliable?

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:15 AM -0500 12/13/02, Frank Abate wrote:
>Re what Larry H says below on this recent thread, yes, i use Google daily,
>and just in the way that he and David B say.  All I meant was (as David
>said, too) that it is not a profound and important source for
>lexicographical research.  It is not unuseful (that un- for you, Larry), but
>it is secondary at best.
>

but earlier, he had written:

>  >
>>>Google is a very lame tool for lexical research compared to, say, a
>  >>robust, dynamic corpus of contemporary English.
>  >

I see know that our apparent disagreement was largely over goals and
terminology.  What I do is research on lexical semantics and
pragmatics, which is a different enterprise from that of doing
lexicography per se.  In his original posting, Frank was deprecating
(ordinary) google as a tool for LEXICAL RESEARCH, which I take to
include what I do.  In the current post, he refers more specifically
to LEXICOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, which is a more specific kettle of fish
(although a kettle in which I too like to angle from time to time).

So the disagreement is amicably resolved, and thanks to this thread I
now know about the very useful (to me) search engine at
http://www.google.com/advanced_group_search, so it's been a
constructive disagreement as these things go.

Larry