Using Google 2

July 27, 2004

And now for an illustration of how wonderfully helpful Google can be: I had to translate "cornrow" yesterday. I had absolutely no idea what it was, couldn't find it in my dictionaries and the context wasn't helpful at all. So I put "cornrow" in Google, hoping to find a photo or an explanation. (As an aside, I've set Google so it only searches in pages written in French, which means that I'm more likely to find a direct translation.) I found several pages with photos: it was a hairstyle that looked like lots of very tight plaits (tresses), so I entered "cornrow + tresses" in Google, and found a page that described that kind of hairstyle as "tresses plaquées". Just to check, I entered "tresses plaquées" and got confirmation that it was the right translation for "cornrow". I was pleased with myself, quite the Ms Marple!

To have an idea of what Google might have looked like at its beginnings, click here (via Language Log and Andrew Kehler).