Friday, January 2, 2009

Are you logging in OR logging on OR signing in?

There's a good post on Stack Overflow titled UI Terminology: Logon vs Login and a great answer by Jeff Atwood. Jeff uses the number of hits when searching for each of the terms "login" (2,020,000,000), "sign in" (430,000,000), "logon" (27,700,000), and "log on" (18,200,000) to indicate what his preference would probably be.
There're a number of alternative uses that Google serves for this type of information. If I can't remember how to spell a word I'll enter it into the Google search box. If I get a "did you mean...." under the search box then I probably mispelled it. I also use it get the context correct if I'm battling between words such as effect and affect.
One use that I had for Google Trends recently was to try and work out when ObservableCollection became available in the .NET framework. It looks like the end of March 2008 marks that date.




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