LL-L "Resources" 2004.01.19 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 19.FEB.2004 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Careers" 2004.01.18 (03) [AE]

Sandy,

I don't quite get what you were trying to say. Of course Google searches for
exact strings - all you have to do is put the string you search for in
quotation marks! I thought everybody knew that, or I would have mentioned
it. Also, it disregards punctuation. So, from your example

> It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a shot rang out!
> Holmes was on the scene in a moment.

you only need to type something distinct, like "shot rang out holmes", and
you get the exact string you're looking for, among maybe a few others which
you can disregard (like: >Not a single shot rang out; Holmes slept
peacefully through the night<). Or you type "shot rang out holmes" and, just
to make it even more specific, you type the separate words scene and stormy
(no quotes) after that.

As an example, if you type "vreselijke moord in Lisse", you get the rest of
the naughty song that Jan shared with us the other day... too bad Ron
wouldn't translate it in to English... :-)

So what on earth makes you think Google doesn't search strings or phrases?
That's just its most important feature!

Gabriele Kahn

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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2004.01.18 (05) [E]

This may be of interest to some of you:

LEO, without doubt the very best German/English (and vice versa) online
dictionary there is: http://dict.leo.org/?lp=ende , is now available in
French/German (and vice versa) as well: http://dico.leo.org/?lp=frde .

This dictionary is the one online service I'd pay for if I had to, but it's
completely free, fast and extremely comprehensive. Couldn't live without it.
The best feature is that you can click to and fro between German and English
entries, which greatly helps in finding synonyms, for example. LEO and
Google is usually all I need for my translation work (unless it is very
technical or legal/financial). I even use LEO to translate from Dutch! In
most cases where I use the dictionary, I already know what a word means but
cannot come up with the best German word for it right away (not getting any
younger and all that). So I enter a word in German or English that means
something similar, and then I click to and fro between languages, always on
the word that comes closest to what I want, until I have the one I was
looking for.

Gabriele Kahn

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From: Jan Strunk <strunkjan at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2004.01.18 (05) [E]

Hello Lowlanders,

I often use Google to check my phraseology, too. That is if I am not sure
how to say something in English, I  just try out the alternatives and see
what gets more hits.

I can tell you, too, that not only private people use internet search
engines for stuff like that but there is a lot of research going on right
now about learning language patterns and getting language data from search
engines or the internet in general in the in computational linguistics. If
anyone's interested and has access to a university library, they might want
to check the latest
issue (maybe one before the latest) of the journal Computational
Linguistics.

Also, on my admittedly rather ugly homepage, I have a small Perl tool that
allows you to issue a query to Google, get all resulting urls and then
spider them to extract sentences with a more restricted full regular
expressions syntax. Moreover, there is a small introduction on the
Linguist's Search Engine (brand new but currently only for English)
http://lse.umiacs.umd.edu/ which is very interesting for people who want to
do syntactic or semantic searches (such as synonyms, antonyms, etc.). If you
like check it out: www.stanford.edu/~jstrunk/

Ron wrote:
> Gabriele's translation check "trick" and Sandy's and Heiko's input under
> "Careers" are great.  I use the "trick" myself, but I do not limit it to
> Google (http://www.google.com/).  If Google does not yield what I want I
do
> not necessarily give up before checking AllThe Web
> (http://www.alltheweb.com/), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/), Teoma
> (http://teoma.com/), Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/), Ixquick
> (http://www.ixquick.com/) and Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/).  I used to
use
> AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), do so rarely these days, because I
> find it is going downhill.
The good thing about AltaVista is that it has a proximity operator, i.e. you
can specify a query like: "go" NEAR "come back". (Although something like
that is implicit in Google's ranking algorithm,
too.)

Have a nice day!

Jan Strunk
jstrunk at stanford.edu
strunk at linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

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