LANGUAGE CENTER - STANFORD UNIVERSITY
As a Tool for Academic Writing
Introduction | Editing Basics | Interpreting Results | Language Research
Interpreting Results
If you have gone through the editing basics section, you have seen examples of how to search for answers to questions you may have about the correctness or acceptability of language forms. You may have noticed that even clearly "ungrammatical" forms show up.
For example, if you type in the sentence "I be happy" (instead of "I am happy") you may be surprised to find 37,500 hits (March 28, 2005). Try it now: Google.
The first few hits you see have "Will I be happy?" "Shouldn't I be happy?" "How can I be happy?" and similar forms. It may be the case that just "I be happy" is fine, but you don't want to go through several hundred sites to find out.
To avoid this problem, you can add a word or phrase to your search that forces the phrase you're looking for to be a likely beginning of a sentence. Try adding "I said": "I said I be happy" (1 hit) vs. "I said I am happy" (1,030 hits) gives very clear results. Try it with "I know": Google.
Here are some points to keep in mind in interpreting the results and deciding what to do with them.
Here is my favorite: "equipments". In my dialect of midwestern English, that just doesn't sound right. It should be " "equipment", an uncountable noun like "furniture". However, when I Google "equipments" I get 1,430,000 hits (March 28, 2005). The fact that I get 127,000,000 for "equipment" doesn't really help since one would expect a lot more hits in the singular than the plural anyway, and 1.4 million is still evidence for common usage. See what you get: Google (Remember, you don't have to use quotes in your search when looking for a single word).
When I googled (yes, google a verb too) "equipments" and looked at the sites of first five hits, here's what I discovered. Two were from India, one was from France, one was from Italy, and one was from the US, but in that site only the word "equipment" appeared--presumably "equipments" had been put in by mistake and corrected but Google still had it tagged for the plural form. This is evidence (though not proof!) of the following: Apparently "equipments" is fine in Indian English (and possibly some other dialects), but If you want to be conventional for US English, don't use it.
After you finish your interpretation, you have three choices.
Keep in mind that even if you think you have the right answer (i.e., #1 is true), you may still be wrong. Remember that Google is just a tool to help you. It won't solve all your problems. However, in my experience, the more you use it, the better.