Language Usage Questions
The problem is that it is not always easy to find the answers to such questions in reference books.…Enter Google. Obviously, there is just as much bad English on the web as there is in the real world. But there is still a chance that the correct form occurs much more frequently than the incorrect one.
I've use Google for this myself. It generally works great.
I've also had conversation where I wondered aloud why Google hasn't tried to license what's it has learned about spelling and grammar to other software companies, allowing them to improve their own spell checking and grammar checking algorithms. Maybe they have and it just hasn't public?