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@uce.ac.uk
url: http://rdues.uce.ac.uk <http://rdues.uce.ac.uk/>
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of Lillian Lee
Sent: 14 March 2005 15:47
To: CORPORA@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@cs.cornell.edu
Ithaca, NY 14853-7501 USA www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee
________________________________________________________________
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