Thread: .in on the radio

Yesterday, the dj on a local Canadian radio station was referring to a website... lo and behold, it was a .in domain.

The dj mentioned that some students were using Phras.in to assist them with phrase issues (I only caught the tail end of what the dj was saying).

I did a bit of research on this website. If you enter two different phrases, the tool will show you how many hits each phrase generates on the search engine(s). The owner of Phras.in suggests that this tool might be particularly useful to people whose first language is not English. However, it also useful if you just want to check the popularity of certain phrases or words. The general assumption is that lower hits either mean it's an incorrect term or it's not as common.

The attraction is that it's probably quicker and more fun to check results through this tool rather than through a search engine. I tried out the tool and here are a few examples:

there you go - 6.08 Million Hits
their you go - 11,800 Hits

run into the ground - 182,000 Hits
run in to the ground - 1,290 Hits

school sucks - 330,000 Hits
work sucks - 2.03 Million Hits
[hee hee - now there's incentive to keep studying and delay working]

Money makes the world go round - 379,000 Hits
Love makes the world go round - 229,000 Hits

Aishwarya Rai - 9.83 Million Hits
Preity Zinta - 2.56 Million Hits
[celebrity popularity]

You won't be able to rely solely on this website to fix all your grammar issues, but it can help point you in the right direction on some things. I think it's an interesting site which can made even better if more add-ons and advanced features were included. I read that some kind of language setting might be included in the future.

Of course, seeing as I heard about this domain on the radio, I can't end this post without mentioning the radio test. Now I'm not sure if it's because I missed most of what the dj had said but at first it wasn't clear to me what the url was - luckily the dj did spell it out.

I hope the Phras.in website does well and I wish the owner best of luck with this .in website. It's certainly nice publicity for the .in domain space.

Thanks for sharing...!