Richard Suchenwirth 2002-06-07 - 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.
#!/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 1Example 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.
2002-09-09 Google changed their layout slightly, so I had to add a space and a comma into the regexp in google'nhits. RS This illustrates the value of the "Google Web API", which Google has more-or-less pledged to maintain upward-compatible.