put in the service of

21:35 Mar 20, 2014 

as to what it means is "The country has taken an integrated, development-focused approach to integrating adaptation and mitigation efforts, including incorporating them into its development plan and vision for 2030." Putting efforts at the service of a plan just sounds odd to me.

21:30 Mar 20, 2014 

that exact phrase, but didn't show me any more hits after the 10th page, so of course can't vouch for the tens of millions.
Be that as it may, take a close look at the instances of "put in the service of" and you will see that most refer to a thing or concept, not to a person. That is the only point I am trying to make here, i.e. usage changes over time.

21:20 Mar 20, 2014 

I just entered "put in the service of" (with quotation marks) and got 27,900,000 hits but mostly not of the actual phrase. If you want to reduce it to that, you have to go to Search Tools > All results > Verbatim, and then you will get only the exact phrase, but Google doesn't give you a hit count for it!

21:05 Mar 20, 2014 

My point is that today this distinction no longer seems to apply.
As for Google, if you use quotation marks, e.g. search for"put in the service of" it will only show instances of that exact phrase. So the number of ghits is indeed a reflection of current usage, albeit not necessarily of correct usage...

21:05 Mar 20, 2014 

A Google hit count like that will include "put in service", for example, which means something quite different.

20:57 Mar 20, 2014 

usually refers to working for somebody else, such as the King, or the lord of the manor (a bit like Upstairs Downstairs), but then you wouldn't expect to find the word "put" there.

As for ghits, if you enter a word containing an intentional spelling mistake, you might be astonished at how many ghits it nevertheless produces. Also, they don't take punctuation into account, which can throw up millions of totally irrelevant hits. Which is why I don't rely too heavily on ghit counts - although they can be a little reassuring where all else has failed!

20:30 Mar 20, 2014 

'put in the service of' = 28 million ghits'
'put at the service of' = 21.3 million ghits