Posted on 03/22/2011 5:39:28 AM PDT by nocamels
“What’s the word I’m looking for?” One of the most common phrases and an especially annoying one if you’re still scratching your brain for that missing word hours later. If English is your second language, you might as well spend your life carrying a heavy dictionary to avoid the constant headache.
Encountering this problem themselves, two Israelis, Onn Freund and Jonathan Raz have developed PhraseUp – a website that aims to fill in your missing word.
Raz recently told Israeli website Newsgeek: “A few days ago I was writing in English, and knew I want to write ‘we have performed a ____ review’, but couldn’t think of the proper word.” The duo therefore came up with PharseUp, which tries to find the slippery word that doesn’t come to mind. It is aimed mainly at non-native English speakers, but also at English speakers who aren’t sure they are using the correct word, Raz explained.
To use PhraseUp, the user is asked to write a complete sentence into the site’s search box, with an asterix (*) sign in place of the missing word. The website then offers different possible solutions, as well as definitions and synonyms.
However, while performing our own searches, NoCamels found that PhraseUp finds the correct word less than 50 percent of the time. PhraseUp is still in Beta stage, however and has updated its site several times following user feedback.
Good morning HG. How are you this AM?
Zot?
What a marvelous invention! I’ll have to tell my friend from Guatemala about this.
May I ask a few questions?
What is the big deal about posting stuff from blogs here? Why do we even have a category called “Bloggers and Personal” if you can’t post blog stuff here?
Am I misunderstanding the rationale for the category?
This doesn’t appear to be an excerpt, so what’s the problem?
Well, * thanks for this. ;-)
Oops, sorry.
“Well, * thanks for this. ;-)” was meant for nocamels.
What an interesting idea.
Interested in the answer bookmark
There is a thin line between posting stuff from blogs and using this site as an advertising platform for someone’s commercial blog. Unlike popular myth, we haven’t banned too many for being ‘blog pimps’ but for how they treat other members. If the community doesn’t care for only small excerpts to be posted of a blog, the author has several choices. Ignore them and realize they will still be criticized, modify how they post to meet the community’s standards, or not post their blog.
If someone, however, posts hundreds upon hundreds of excerpted links to their own blogs with little or no commentary, we could see that as trying to use the site for advertising instead of discussing the topic. We may also wonder if that is a bot automatically spamming articles and not a real person. Those cases, they may risk banning.
Another challenge is when a blogger takes another site’s content, and attempts to present it as their own. (Plagiarism) If the content is not original to the site, it should be linked to as original the source is possible.
When we get down to it, we take it on a case-by-case basis.
Bacon tree?
No, ham bush!
I understand now. Thanks for answering my question.
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