Monco!

We have just launched Monco — an experimental monitor corpus search engine which can be used to monitor some of the the most recent developments in English usage. We are starting with an index of some 1,1 billion words in 49 million sentences. This may not be the biggest monitor corpus ever made available, but it is growing at the rate of some 8 million words per day. So, if you check our Statistics page in a few hours from now, chances are you notice a change in the total number of words indexed. In this sense, Monco be described as a near-real time monitor corpus search engine, a new type of tool which offers certain advantages over other, less regularly updated reference corpora.
Monco supports queries for lexical and simple lexicogrammatical patterns. For example, a query like this:

break** mold

with the slop parameter set to 2 will match different variants of this idiomatic phrase similar to those shown here. In addition to keywords-in-context concordances, Monco generates query summaries and metadata visualisations. We describe the basic search functionality of Monco on the help page. More examples and use cases of Monco will be published on this blog.