Using Google to Examine English Usage

Common English Blunders, Misspellings

Google, or any other search engine for the Web, can be a tool for examining English usage on the Web.

For example, one can use Google to get the number of Web pages containing a correctly spelled word vs. the number of Web pages containing one or more misspelled forms of that word.

One can also look for bad grammar, bad punctuation, and so on.

Several of my blog posts have included my results of these kinds of searches at Google.

To find these blog posts, simply go to the blog archives, enter “Google” (without the quotation marks) in the search box, and click the [Search] button.

However, don’t expect these Google-based comparisons of correct versus incorrect usage to remain static. As usage changes, so will the Google results.