Sometimes I find a kanji or jukugo and I want to do a quick check of popularity or I want to see examples of usage. Google is excellent for doing this–at least for ‘Internet Japanese.’
The problem is my default English Google setup tends to favor Chinese over Japanese websites when doing Japanese searches without kana. I don’t know if this happens with everyone outside Japan, but it happens all the time for me. I could change the default setting to Japanese, but that would skew English searches.
Anyway, when I want to search for a Japanese text that is all kanji, I type the Japanese I want to search for and then add a 「は」. Since the particle 「は」 is (almost) invariably in every Japanese web page and it wouldn’t be on a Chinese website, the results are almost all from Japanese websites.
I’m sure adding the 「は」 does affect the search in more ways than that, though. It would be best for ‘important’ searches* to go into Google settings and change it temporarily to ‘Japanese.’
- You know, the kind of searches where life and death are at stake.