Origin: http://wiki.tcl.tk/3490 Author: Richard Suchenwirth
Given some piece of data where it is doubtful whether they are correct or not, one way to find out is just to ask a search engine like Google, but disregard the results except for the number of found web pages. Chances are that the correct data have a higher hit rate than the faulty one.
Example output in the text widget (asking about a city in Italy, where post code and province were unsure): 'bellaria rn': 3580 hits 'bellaria fo': 609 hits 'bellaria 47814': 1130 hits 'bellaria 47014': 30 hits
These results seem to indicate that 47814 Bellaria RN (Rimini) is the correct address ;-) On single words one might use this for spelling verification: 'suchenwirth': 280 hits 'suchenworth': 0 hits
..or to check how strong an association between several words is: 'suchenwirth tcl': 57 hits 'suchenwirth java': 14 hits
The numbers may change over time, but the tendency ("fuzzy truth") can at least be estimated.
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Copy to clipboard1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | #!/bin/sh
# \
exec wish "$0" "$@"
package require http
#http::config -proxyhost proxy -proxyport 80
proc google'nhits query {
set url http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=[string map {" " +} $query]&hc=0&hs=0
set token [http::geturl $url]
set data [http::data $token]
http::cleanup $token
set nhits 0
regexp {\n[0-9-]+ of ([0-9]+)} $data -> nhits
set nhits
}
proc go {w} {
global query
$w insert end "'$query': [google'nhits $query] hits\n"
}
entry .e -textvar query -bg white
bind .e <Return> {go .t}
text .t -bg white
pack .e .t -fill x -expand 1
|
patch for line 13. in order to make this work with the current google.yahoo.com format (as of september 2003), consider replacing line 13 with:
cheers,
Tobias
(http://uni-sql.de)