Blogtrek

Googlisms

Recently I found out about a googly type site on the Internet. It is Googlisms. No, this is not Google&tm;. It is a site set up by an Australian in which you type in a name, click a radio button labeled "who", "where", "what", or "when", and submit, and the result is a list of quotes from the Internet concerning the name you submitted. For example, if you submit "bill gates", you get things like "bill gates is satan conspiracy theory", "bill gates is the pope" and so forth. So I experimented with it. I submitted my name and got nothing. I submitted the names of some people I know, and I got some items on some of them. I then tried dates and organizations such as the Astronomical League and got lists of items describing them. I tried "blogtrek" and got "blogtrek is getting out". I don't want to see that. I looked "blogtrek is getting out" in Google and got one of my previous pages in which I find that other bloggers are listing a link to my Blogtrek. I wrote "I am glad to see that word of Blogtrek is getting out." As you can see, Googlisms took that phrase right out of context. That is not what I meant at all. I found an even more egregious case when I looked up "toastmasters". I got "toastmasters is only for professional speakers". Whaaa?? The whole purpose of Toastmasters is to give people new to public speaking or afraid of it a chance to get better with speaking. It is not just for professional speakers. I looked up the phrase in Google and got from the site http://www.portlandtn.com/toastmasters.htm the quote "Some might think Toastmasters is solely for professional speakers. It is not. Toastmasters come from a variety of occupations and backgrounds.". By taking the phrase out of context, Googlisms completely reversed the meaning of this quote!

I did some more "googlisming" and concluded that it looks for your search term plus "is" (not "are", not "was"; if you try a plural noun, you may not get any hits) plus a phrase that lasts until something other than a letter, number, sharp, or space is found. No wonder we get out-of-context returns. "of" phrases can easily change radically in meaning: "A daughter of Mary is a kindergartener." to kindergarten together" becomes "Mary is a kindergartener." Googlisms will make the mother go to school too.

Therefore I consider this site dangerous. Using "is" as your verb is said to be bad form, and it does not occur that often. Therefore, most of the people I know get no hits, even though they occur frequently on the Web. You now have to be careful how you use "is" because Googlism will pick it up and chop your sentence to pieces. Googlisms may be fun, but don't take it too seriously. Take everything in context.