FW: [Corpora-List] problems with Google counts

[Antoinette Renouf]

Dear List Members

We sympathise with the comments yesterday about Google's shortcomings as
a web search tool for linguists, though to be fair it does not pretend
to be tailored for such use. The latest problem for the users of our
WebCorp search tool is Google's abandonment of the wildcard ('*')
character, which though never officially part of the Google repertoire,
functioned until this month in pattern search and was exploited by
WebCorp. We have now reinstated this function in our tool.

 

As a longer-term solution, however, we shall be launching a new version
of WebCorp later this year, which works directly with our own tailored
search engine. 

 

Back in 1998, when WebCorp development began, we anticipated that Google
and other search engines would present obstacles, and so in 2000
established a fruitful relationship with a UK search engine company. We
have since built most of the planned linguistic and computational
components required for our own search engine, and we expect to meet
future WebCorp user needs on all fronts, from speed and coverage to
linguistic and statistical sophistication.

 

Further details will be made available via our website:
http://www.webcorp.org.uk/ 

 

Antoinette Renouf

Andrew Kehoe

Jay Banerjee

 

---------------------------------------

Antoinette Renouf

Professor of English Language and Linguistics

School of English

University of Central England in Birmingham

Franchise Street

Perry Barr

Birmingham B42 2SU

 

tel: +44 (0)121 331 7230

fax: +44 (0)121 331 6622

mob: +44 (0)7980 750037

email: ajrenouf at uce.ac.uk

url: http://rdues.uce.ac.uk <http://rdues.uce.ac.uk/> 

 

-----Original Message-----

From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On

Behalf Of Lillian Lee

Sent: 14 March 2005 15:47

To: CORPORA at uib.no

Subject: [Corpora-List] problems with Google counts

 

Dear list members,

You might be interested to know that until approximately March 8th,

Google counts appear to have been quite off (inflation rates of a

factor of 66%?), according to Jean Veronis.

 

________________________________________________________________

Lillian Lee, Assoc. Prof.    tel: 607-255-8119

Dept of Computer Science     fax: 607-255-4428 

Cornell University           llee at cs.cornell.edu   

Ithaca, NY 14853-7501 USA    www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee

________________________________________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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