Checking English phrases using Google

Written by Liz

Whenever you are working in a second language, there might be times where you want to check a phrase you want to use. While it would be great if you always have a native speaker to ask, sometimes there’s no one around. In those cases, there is an easy and democratic way to check- ask the Internet!

When I was taking an English academic writing course in college, the professor gave us a tip that I found to be very helpful. If we weren’t sure which phrase to use when we were writing, just go to Google Scholar, type in the phrase surrounded by quotation marks, and see how many responses came up! 

As you can see, while “you are now linked to” has only 19 results, “you are now connected to” has 238 results. In addition, when I looked at the results, the results for “you are now linked to” were either 1) from the same paper or 2) not about the subject that I want to write about (software). As such, we can conclude that the more widely used phrase is “you are now connected to,” and write accordingly. The benefit to asking on Google Scholar vs. regular Google is that the writing quality is a little more assured. Because most academic articles should have gone through some sort of peer-review, the results we get should be at a generally acceptable standard.

However, if you’re more worried about if the phrase is used in general, or if your phrase isn’t found at all in Google Scholar, you can do a regular Google search as well.

In this case, what you need to remember is that the Internet is a vast place, and many people who produce content on it are not native English speakers. Even if your phrase comes up with a lot of hits, you should examine those hits and their context to see if it matches what you are writing about. If the only hits you get for a phrase come from sites that are clearly translated, or there are other obvious language mistakes, you might want to get a second opinion.

I said at the beginning that this is for anyone working with a second language- I personally think that you can use this trick even if you aren’t looking for phrases in English. However, you should probably use a local search engine (for example, Naver or Daum for Korean) if you want to get authentic, native speaker usages. The absolute best option, of course, is to create your very own corpus of authentic materials to search through. Since most of us don’t have those kinds of resources, searching through the pages of the Internet will have to do.