BBS Kirchdorf
Gregor Schrettle
2015/16
VOCABULARY WORK WITH GOOGLE PHRASE SEARCH
This is a great way to
-
improve your writing style and
work on your vocabulary skills.1
If you practice and apply this technique properly, you will find it to be an extremely powerful tool for
writing perfect English.
This is how you use Google phrase search to learn new vocabulary:
1. Highlight all the new words in the vocabulary unit you are working on.
2. Pick 15 words that you didn’t know before. Read and study the translations.
3. This is the most important step: Take the first word and try to think of a context in which
you would expect to see this word in a sentence.
For example:
Unit 1 has the word “encounter” in it.
a. Read and study the translation: “Begegnung”.
b. Try to imagine a sentence that deals with an encounter.
For example, an encounter will take place somewhere. So you could try the phrase
"encounter took place".
Another possible context: People might say after an encounter that it was very good
and led to great results. They might use the word “fruitful” to describe that (like the
German phrase “fruchtbare Zusammenarbeit” suggests, for instance). So you could
try the phrase "very fruitful encounter".
4. Go to Google.com. Enter your phrase with quotation marks at the beginning and at the end.
!! ALWAYS use the English version of Google!! You will get much better results!
Depending on your browser, go to www.google.com/webhp?hl=en or
www.google.com/ncr to get to the English version. (You might still have to click
“Use Google.com” in the bottom right corner.)
!! You have to write the quotation marks directly in Google, not in Word.
5. Look at and analyze the results.
a. How many results did Google find? Anything less than 1,000 results is usually not
very common.
b. Where do the results come from?
If most of your results come from an address that has .de or .at or .fr or .it
1
Please note: This also works with Bing and other search engines. Personally, I have found working with Google
to be somewhat more satisfying – but that is nothing but a personal preference.
in it, the phrase might be a literal translation of a German or French or Italian phrase.
It might be uncommon in English.
For instance:
- You see that “value” means “Wert.”
- You think: “Well … We often say ‘großen Wert auf etwas legen’ — so I’ll try ‘lay
big value on.’”
- You search the phrase "lay big value on" on Google.
- You get 395 results.



The first result is located at www.bauunternehmenraguse.de/seiten/english_index.htm.
The address of the third one is
www.stuatech.at/seiten_englisch/referenz_en.htm.
The fourth one is at www.rma.de/en/duisburg/hotel_mirage.html .
This is not English!
- So let’s try the same phrase, but without “big.”
- Getting better … The quality of the results has improved. Some of them are from
English-speaking countries. But we only have 241 results—not enough.
Now we can try a fantastic trick:
- We take the phrase "we lay value on" and replace the word “lay” with a
star, or asterisk (*). This is a wildcard—it can stand for any word or number of
words!
So let’s search "we * value on" and see what happens.
- PLACE seems to be the word we need!
- Let’s try "we place value on"—Not bad at all. We get 162,000 results. But
we might find an even better phrase.
- Let’s see what happens if we put an asterisk between “place” and “value.” Wow—
we get 31,300,000 results!
If we look at the first two pages of results, we can see that "place a high
value on" is apparently the phrase of choice for native speakers of English!!
By the way, it’s especially good to use documents that are located, for instance, at
.co.uk, .gov, .edu, or .ac.uk, (although of course documents at .com
addresses can contain excellent language, too).
6. From the Google search results, copy a whole sentence that has your phrase in it. Paste it
into your document.
For instance:
Robert Palmer’s untimely death in September 2003 ended
what promised to be a very fruitful encounter.
7. Do this for the other 14 words that you selected.
BE PATIENT & HAVE FUN!