Google glitches?

[Jonathan Lighter]

A Google Books ebook of Moby-Dick gives the author as "Professor Herman
Melville," like he used to play ragtime piano at the Spouter Inn.

But who am I to doubt information gleaned electronically?  I mean really.

JL

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 1:07 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Google glitches?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If, instead of enclosing a string of words in quotation marks, one
> connects the words with hyphens, are the results better?  All I can tell is
> that the number of "hits" is very different for the two methods of
> "stringing."
>
> --Charlie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Dave
> Wilton [dave at WILTON.NET]
> Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 12:54 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> That's part of how Google "helps" you search. Quotation marks in Google,
> contrary to what you might think, do not mean a character string search. It
> means "give me results that kind of, sort of, approximately match the
> phrase
> I type."
>
> For the vast majority of Google searches, this is genuinely helpful. But it
> significantly reduces the search engine's utility for any kind of lexical
> research.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
> Of
> Joel S. Berson
> Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 12:30 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Google glitches?
>
> I tried searching Google Books with a date range for "entered the * year of
> his age" [quoted].  Some of the results highlight "entered into the <Nth>
> year of his age".
>
> I would think "into the" would fail my quoted search term.  (It shouldn't
> be
> a consequence of the *, since it's on the other side of the "the".)
>
> Joel
>
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