Quite! 15:55 Jun 7, 2012
But at the risk of being a bore, I would add one more thing, since this question of Google hits is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. I've just done my own searches for "baby's dummy" and "baby's soother" (as phrases) in UK sites. Google announced 53,000 hits for the former and 11,000 for the latter. But the real figures, ascertained by going to the end of the list, were 628 and 338 respectively. Google always does this, and it's very annoying; the initial figure is vastly inflated.
By the way, I repeated the exercise for Ireland, just out of interest. The results (real figures) were 96 and 104 respectively, so there seems to something in what you say, Donal.
Moreover, when I searched for "baby's soother", Google suggested I might have meant "baby soother", so I tried that as well and got a further 220 results in Ireland and 459 in the UK. Quite striking. "Soother", according to this, is more common that I thought. |