Google Spell Checker

You know Google for sure. You certainly know Gmail, Google Earth and Picasa. But do you know Google Spell Checker? It is certainly not the case since it does not really exist. This is just a different use of the Google search engine.

As an example let’s take the (plural) expression models predictions. It is a very common mistake for French speaking people – such as me – to write it like this. The idea is to let Google mine the web and give you the number of hits he gets for this expression. Here a possible answer:

Let’s try with the expression model predictions and here is the answer we get:

You can easily see that people write considerably more often the expression model predictions without the s. This way of correcting English is clearly not sure, since it is based on how people write the term on the web. However, you can generally have good corrections if you are too lazy to look into a dictionary

[I leave the blog for one week, since I'm going on holidays.]

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