Google as infinite style guide?  

Mark Liberman defines thesaurusizing: using a thesaurus to spruce up a paper (or blog post!) with words one has never used before, and usually screwing up the usage since a thesaurus doesn't contain information about proper usage. Of course, nowadays you can just crosscheck usage with Google and avoid sounding incoherent or pretentious. It odd that these features can't be integrated -- ie there's no way (at least that I can think of) to get Google to spit out synonyms unless the synonyms are enumerated somewhere on the searchable net. I suppose it's because there relationship between two synonyms is semantic rather than grammatical?

I've never thought of it this way before, but Google's search results rely heavily on metonymic rather than metaphoric relationships between words -- that is to say, individual words are identified with words that are found in the same context (adjacent), rather than with words that have some kind of deeper similarity (beneath). Would a metaphor engine have any practical use?