Re[2]: [tied] I'm back with a few questions

At 8:25:12 PM on Wednesday, January 25, 2006, andrew
jarrette wrote:

>>Use Google. You'll get some 57,400 hits for "I vomit" plus
>>27,500 for "they vomit", plus more than 600 for each of
>>the corresponding present continuous variants.

> Ingenious.  But I know that if you google "I vomit",
> you get all instances of "vomit" and "I" in the same
> website or in the same sentence (even paragraph, I think),
> and not necessarily the exact sequence "I vomit".

If you type in the search string

I vomit

you'll get a hit so long as the words <I> and <vomit> occur
on the same web page. However, if you enclose the string in
quotes --

"I vomit"

you'll get only those pages that contain the string <I
vomit>. Some of these might still be false positives, of
course, since punctuation is ignored (e.g.,

It was I. 'Vomit is disgusting,' I said.

will give a hit), but there shouldn't be many.

Brian