English-Corpora.org

English-Corpora.org


LIMITS

Recently we changed the amount of access that users have each day. And the limits are now based on whether a person has a premium or academic license, rather than on "user level".

Searches (click for explanation) Basic access (per day) With license (premium or academic)
    # searches 20 200
    # KWIC lines 2000 20,000
Word pages (COCA / iWeb) 20 200
Browsing (COCA / iWeb) 150 1,000
Analyze texts (COCA) 10 searches / 250 words each 100 searches / 5,000 words each
Saved lists # lists (Explanation)
Virtual corpora 5 (per corpus) 1,000
Saved KWIC lines 5 lists / 100 lines (per corpus) 1,000 lists: 20,000 lines
Saved words / phrases 5 1,000
Customized word lists 5 1,000
Search history 20 searches 10,000 searches

Why the changes?

In terms of searches (the first section), we found that 98% of the users (regardless of "user category") had 20 searches or less each day (the first and perhaps the most important number shown above). In other words, for this 98% of users, they really won't notice any difference with the new limits. But for the 2% of users who do more than about 20 searches a day, a premium or academic license should be helpful.

In terms of the saved lists, most of these features really are for "advanced" users of the corpora. But even those with "basic access" will still be able to create a small number of saved lists -- to see how they work, and to see if it would make sense to have enhanced access with a premium or academic license.


Note: because the limits have been decreased (but again, this shouldn't affect 98% of the users), there might be a temptation for the other 2% to just use multiple accounts to bypass the limits. Please don't do that. We review "questionable" activity like this every day, and we have lots of logged data to let us know what is going on. Accounts that are found to be in violation are blocked, and the only way to unblock them is by getting a license, which is what those users probably should have done in the first place. Please don't risk it.