Caption on a nature site: "Ruby-_Throat_ Hummingbird" (UNCLASSIFIED)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Jul 9 20:15:43 UTC 2012


On Jul 9, 2012, at 4:04 PM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC wrote:

> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
>>
>>> And when I tried combining it with "the Fugitive", I got a
> surprisingly
>> close competition:
>>>
>>> "one-armed man" + "the Fugitive":  34,700
>>> "one-arm man" + "the Fugitive":  21,700
>
> The latter would also include "man with one arm", bumping its count up.

Really?  That flies in the face of what I understood to be a constraint on searching Google using quotes, which as far as I know would rule out "man with one arm" from being included in a search on "one-arm man".  I understand that "one arm man" would indeed be included, since it's not sensitive to hyphens (at least not consistently), or of course to upper/lower case, but would it really ignore the mismatch in word order and in presence vs. absence of "with"?

LH

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