cardshark

[Dave Wilton]

Google has funky, unexplained, and continually changing rules for handling
punctuation, inflections, and spelling variations.

Google is *not* a character-string-based search engine. Even if you put the
search criterion in quotes, the search engine does not do an exact character
match. Their aim is to produce "relevant" results, not exact character
matches (with what is "relevant" defined by what Google engineers think most
people are looking for).

You sometimes even get a result that doesn't contain any of the words you
searched on, but that Google's analysis has determined has a high
correlation with the searched-for terms.

Furthermore, their counts contain repeat results (multiple websites that
contain the same text--very common for things like AP wire stores where a
single story can generate a thousand or so duplicates).

Any comparison of Google results along these lines is not to be trusted.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Joel S. Berson
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 7:45 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: cardshark

Doesn't Google "intelligently" handle the hyphen, so that
"card-shark" and "cardshark" amount to the same?  I don't know what
it does with space vs. single word, although I have my suspicions --
that is, searching for "card shark" might count
"cardshark/card-shark", but not vice versa.

Joel

At 4/29/2008 11:19 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>Is "card shark" a candidate for eggcorn?  Neither OED nor AHD list it,
>although both, not surprisingly, have "card sharp."  Google gives the
>following results:
>
>card shark      549,000
>card-shark      259,000
>cardshark       259,000
>cardsharking         112
>cardsharker              9
>
>card sharp      857,000
>card-sharp      138,000
>cardsharp       137,000
>cardsharping      9,130
>cardsharper        8,980
>
>The hyphenated and single word searches produce essentially the same
>lists, and there appears to be considerable overlap between the forms
>with and without the space.
>
>Herb
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org