What should I follow? B follows A. vs B follows after A.

[Gray]

A) B follows A.

B) B follows after A.

Google gave more than a million hits for ‘follows after’.

What should I follow – B or A?

[Alan]

Hi Gray,

Google doesn’t know it all. I would say simply: B follows A. ‘After’ isn’t really needed because that idea of ‘after’ is already contained in the verb ‘follow’.

Alan

[Gray]

Yes, I was pretty much sure about the option A until the google search confused me. It means millions are using it incorrectly. I would say I am fortunate to have it cleared.

And definitely, I am not going to trust google This reminds me of the story of google itself. Someone misspelled that word and it became ‘google’ …which was unintentional

Thanks.

[Infin1ty]

@Gray

Yes, I was pretty much sure about the option A until the google search confused me. It means millions are using it incorrectly. I would say I am fortunate to have it cleared.

And definitely, I am not going to trust google This reminds me of the story of google itself. Someone misspelled that word and it became ‘google’ …which was unintentional

Thanks.

You are absolutely right, Gray. Trust Google implicitly is not a very good idea.(Someone said somewhere…)

[AmYankee]

@Gray

Yes, I was pretty much sure about the option A until the google search confused me. It means millions are using it incorrectly. I would say I am fortunate to have it cleared.

Hi Gray
Did you know that you will only get millions of Google results for “follows after” if you do not enclose those two words in quotations marks?

Google is a handy tool, but like any tool, you need to learn how to use it – and that includes looking at the results you get and analyzing them. Raw numbers often don’t tell you very much, or can be quite misleading.

@Infin1ty

Trust Google implicitly is not a very good idea.

I agree, and that applies to lots more than just Google.

All the best,
Amy

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[size=84][color=darkblue]ESL teacher, translator, native speaker of American English[/size]

[Gray]

@AmYankee

Did you know that you will only get millions of Google results for “follows after” if you do not enclose those two words in quotations marks?

Yes Amy, I did know that.

@AmYankee

Google is a handy tool, but like any tool, you need to learn how to use it – and that includes looking at the results you get and analyzing them. Raw numbers often don’t tell you very much, or can be quite misleading.

Exactly! Google has given us a great tool to analyze the text but we don’t have a machine which could understand natural languages (we humans should be proud of our languages and our ability to interpret those ).