Imagine you have two forms of a sentence, both grammatically correct; how do you decide which one is the more appropriate option to go with?
You could ask your English teacher or friends. Or you could get a little creative and Google both sentences; the one with the more search results will be the one mostly used by people. This could be helpful in determining the appropriate sentence. A website that provides this “Google” feature in a more convenient way is “Phras.in”.
Phras.in is a free to use website that lets you compare two different sentences in the abovementioned Google way. It simply shows which sentence gets more search results on Google. On the service’s homepage you find two fields where you can enter the sentences.
Suppose you want to decide between “Should I say?” or “Shall I say?”. After you type the sentences in the fields, their number of results is displayed next to the field.
After clicking on the “Contextualize ‘em” button you can have the site show you which sentence could be used. The sentence with the lower number of hits will be grayed out.
Under these fields you will find the search results that were generated by each sentence.
Especially for people whose 2nd language is English, Phras.in could prove to be a very useful tool.
