Using the WWW as a Reference Tool

In 1996, when I threw together the succinct description of APsaA that appears on our home page, I wrote, “The Association is comprised of Affiliate Societies…” Recently, I received an e-mail criticizing my grammar from one of the tens of thousands of people who have viewed that statement over the past seven years. The critic pointed out that “of” should never follow “comprised,” and that I should have written “composed of.” Not being a grammarian, I did what many people do in such situations these days. I turned to Google! (google.com). Google is currently the premier WWW search facility and contains a word-by-word full text inversion of billions of WWW pages and other documents. (This means that every word in every document is indexed for rapid searching.)

I used Google's phrase search facility to search for the phrase “comprised of.” Ordinarily, Google ignores common words like “of,” but in phrases enclosed in quotation marks all words count. The first page my search found was from a grammarian who advised against “comprised of” and informed me that “composed of” is preferred. But then I noticed that my Google search had found over two million pages on the WWW containing the phrase “comprised of”! For comparison, I searched for “composed of” and that time Google found about 3 million pages. My conclusion: Based on the common usage of “comprised of,” I don't think it can be considered a serious error any longer.

Because such a huge body of English text is indexed by Google, it is a wonderful resource for investigating current language usage. Many users of Google don't know that Google also allows “wildcard” searching in phrases, where a “*” character can stand for an entire word. For example, if you search for the phrase: “psychoanalysis is a * treatment” (you must include the quotation marks) you will find variations of that phrase where the “*” is replaced by words such as “powerful,” “medical,” “curative,” and “talking.” Perhaps because this latter facility doesn't work correctly all the time yet, Google doesn't advertise its availability.