Make Your Language Richer with Google Search: Tricks and Tools

The Internet has changed our attitude to the language: it has introduced us to the new language standards and rules. Today one doesn’t need to be a great writer to be considered a great author (and blogger).

On the other hand, the Internet has created so many new possibilities for a person who wants to learn or improve his language knowledge and skills. The main thing is to find the tools and to learn to use them properly.

This post is about making your writing style richer and finding language inspiration with Google Search: yes, the search tool you may be using routinely daily can become your best language learning help.

1. Phrase Inspiration: Google Wildcard (*) Operator

Have you ever had bad time remembering the idiom or a good phrase which is usually used in the similar context (while only remembering a (base) word)? Have you ever struggled to find the best suitable adjective for the noun you are using? Have you ever been in need of finding more ways to enrich a word combination with some good word that would fit in perfectly there?

Then you are likely to appreciate the tip.

A wildcard search operator tells Google to use a word (or a phrase) in place for it. In other words if you use * in-between a phrase, Google will be prompted to substitute it with a word or two which would normally go there.

Let’s make things clearer with a few examples:

1. Let’s say you know your base adjective but would like to find some nouns that can be used with it. Search Google for ["adjective *"] to see those nouns in bold. Same technique can be applied to finding words in-between phrase ["adjective * noun"]:

2. Can’t remember a post position, a phrasal verb or an idiom? – Use a * in place of the word you struggle to remember:

2. Synonym Inspiration: Google Synonyms

Google had been experimenting a lot with synonyms and related terms highlighting until the synonym search was announced to be a default one. Whenever you search for something, you will see closely related terms returned and highlighted in search results:

However you can let Google use more synonyms and even focus the results on them. The ~ operator prompts Google to use more synonyms and related searches which gives you more clues on the topic:

And you can even prompt Google to search only for synonyms excluding the base search term from search results:

There’s the way to always see those synonyms while you search Google with Google Semantics FireFox addon. What it basically does is:

• Grabs your search term,
• Adds ~ before it and searches Google;
• Extracts the synonyms Google used in bold;
• Displays the list before your initial search results.

You thus instantly see the list of synonyms right before your search results and can browse further (click any of the synonyms and you’ll be taken to new search results page).

3. Word Context Inspiration

Do you want to know which words and phrases your core term tends to go together? Look into Google search snippets!

A search snippet is (normally) a two-line text extract from the target page that contains your search term. Thus, this is your core term immediate context.

By figuring out which words tend to appear in the search snippet, you will get the list of your core term immediate context.

Search Cloudlet (install here) analyzes Google SERPs and extracts most frequent words that tend to appear in the search snippet together with your term; then it builds a tag cloud based on the popularity of each one.

Here are a few tips on making the most of that simple tool:

• For richer results set Google to show 100 results per page (that tool will have more data analyze then). The addon “sees” as many results as you do.
• When you do not need to analyze or get inspired, just click Off and the tool won’t bug you again until you need it.

Do you use Google for inspiration? Please share your tips with us!

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