Metaglossia: The Translation World

I’ve just discovered an online time suck that is not only addictive to the language lover, but a source of writerly ideas. It’s the Google N-gram Viewer.

N-grams are drawn from a text or speech corpus that shows how the frequency of a word or phrase changes over time.

The corpus for the Google N-gram Viewer is a database of more than five million digitized books published between 1500 and 2008.

The GNV holds an intrinsic interest for me because I write about language, but it is also of value to me as a writer of historical fiction. It’s a means of catching anachronistic vocabulary in a story set in the past.

Another use of the GNV database–also of value to writers- is to get a notion of changes in cultural values as reflected in published materials.

 

How can we tame the “beast” that is Google and get it to work for us? Here are some quick Google search tips to help:

1. Keep your search terms simple and use only the main words. For example, if you are looking for information on asthma in children who live in New York City, enter: asthma children NYC

2. If you are looking for specific approaches, add more terms: asthma diet supplements relaxation yoga

3. Use relevant synonyms if you’re not finding what you need. For example: asthma herbs “herbal medicine” supplements vitamins

4. If you are searching a phrase, put it in quotes. For example, “ear acupuncture” (in quotes) will return 268,000 results, narrowed down from 2,360,000 results if you had typed ear acupuncture without quotes.

 5. You can limit your searches to educational sites, government sites or organizational sites to help find more credible information by typing the word “site” followed by a colon and then .edu, .gov or .org, respectively, after your search terms. For example, to look up information about using biofeedback to treat migraine:

• for educational sites, type biofeedback migraine site:.edu
• for government sites, type biofeedback migraine site:.gov
• for organizational sites, type biofeedback migraine site:.org

Or, to include all these sites (.edu, .gov and .org) but to eliminate commercial sites, you can just type a minus sign before “site:.com.” For example: anxiety meditation –site:.com

 6. To ensure the websites you retrieve are focused on your area of interest, you can require the search word to appear in the site title by typing “Intitle:” before your search word. For example, Intitle:fibromyalgia will yield 916,000 results, versus 15,600,000 results if you had just typed fibromyalgia.

 http://healthbytesnyc.com/popular/google-search-tips-get-better-faster-results/

Serial Internet entrepreneur Michael Robertson is at it again. Robertson has launched RadioSearchEngine.com, calling it "the world's first radio search engine." If you're a Luke Bryan fan, a Metallica fan, or a Jay-Z fan, all you have to do is type the artist's name in the search box atwww.radiosearchengine.com and every radio station playing Luke Bryan will appear. You can stick with that station if you like the next song or click on the artist's name you originally typed in the search engine on the right side of the website. A list of songs playing from that artist are waiting for you to listen to. You can also listen to your local stations, which appear on the site when you first go to radiosearchengine.com.

Robertson says, "Listeners are presented with an array of listening options that invite users to move smoothly between a no-effort radio experience or a near-demand experience. A recommendation engine identifies 20 similar songs likely of interest. A chart ranks other popular songs in that genre. A traditional skip button advances to a new related song. Together, these options allow listeners to fine tune their audio experience from hands-off radio to playing just old favorites or new hits. Unlike other radio services, there's no limit on fast forwarding, plus users can search for and play specific songs."

Example links
radiosearchengine.com -- Play local stations, locate trending songs and popular shows
radiosearchengine.com/search/metallica -- Get a list every Metallica song playing on radio
radiosearchengine.com/search/kati-perry-roar -- List all stations playing Katy Perry's "Roar"
radiosearchengine.com/search/beatles -- Listen to any Beatles song being broadcast
radiosearchengine.com/search/chill -- Find a list of songs playing on top Chill stations
radiosearchengine.com/search/country -- Find a list of songs playing on top Country stations

7 Don't settle for the first hit. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines are built to filter out and sort search results based on their assumed relevance to the original query, but they're not perfect. The top return may not be the most reliable one but rather the most-visited site or the result of a calculated attempt to manipulate a search engine by including keywords designed to artificially improve a site's prominence in search results. Students should always look at multiple pages to find the best, most reliable info.

Example: Search for "drug trafficking" on Google, and the top result is a Wikipedia article on the subject. Just below it, however, is a study on the topic by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, an official -- and presumably more reliable -- source.

8 Learn how to search. To help eliminate some of the steps in sorting the good results from the bad, learning to use a search engine's more advanced settings is important. Locate and explore the filters in your search engine of choice to help refine results on the front end based on criteria such as creation date and region, reading level, previously visited pages and specific types of media (images, videos, news, etc.). For younger users, it may be useful to try search engines such as Ask.com or WolframAlpha.com, which allow queries to be entered as a question instead of as individual keywords.

Example: Users can keep up to date on the developing situation in Syria by searching for the country's name in Google's "news" section or by using a "creation date" filter to limit results to only those sites that have been updated within the last day, week or month.

Contact staff writer Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.

 http://timesfreepress.com/news/2013/sep/13/eight-tips-to-help-students-find-reliable/   ;