Dialecticon relaunch

The Dialecticon has been relaunched. It is used to compare the frequency of usage of pairs of words within the major English-speaking countries. For common words that differ between the US and UK, such as diaper and nappy, you can see where Australia and Canadian usage tends. You can also enter a word and its commonly misspelt variant, such as miniscule and minuscule, to see which countries contain the better spellers.

The relaunch sees an improvement in the speed of showing results and somewhat smarter graphics. The data now come from Google's JSON API rather than Yahoo, as the latter started charging. Unfortunately, Google only provides 100 results for free per day. As each Dialecticon query uses 8 results (2 searches per country), only 12 Dialecticon queries can be made. Let's hope it remains unpopular!

Whilst searching for a replacement for Yahoo I had a look at the Bing API, which seemed promising. However, it did not return an accurate count of results, making it unusable for my goals. Thinking this might be a temporary ailment I checked the official Bing API forum and found it full of unanswered complaints about faulty results over many months. I think Microsoft have forgotten about maintaining the API after putting a lot of effort into producing a potentially useful resource.

The Google Custom Search API is producing some anomalous results. The main Google index shows gaol being used one-tenth as often in the UK as jail, but the API shows it as far less than one-hundredth. There's not much I can do about this, so don't rely on the charts for your PhD theses.