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Trying to create a notification message for a user on a website.

Right now, the flow is that following some search, results are presented to a user with text such as:

"I Found you these great results !"

I understand this can be changed to "Here are some ... "

But what I am really trying to understand is if this is a legit usage of language: I found you X

I am of course a non native, so maybe the "strangeness" is just to my ears..

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    'I found you X' also has the meaning 'My impression of you was that you are X' so you have to be a bit careful with the phrasing - if the user searches for 'boring' then telling them that 'I found you boring!' wouldn't go down well Commented Nov 6, 2018 at 16:24

2 Answers 2

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It's perfectly grammatical.

In the same way that ditransitive verbs (like give and show) can be used in two ways,

I gave the book to her.

or

I gave her the book.

many verbs can have a benefactive "for X", which can be treated the same way:

I baked a cake for her.

or

I baked her a cake.

So "I found you this" is identical in meaning to "I found this for you".

To me, this is something that would be said by a friend, or a person who had been working with me and established some sort of relationship. To have a piece of software say it strikes me as presumptuous, trying to pretend that it has a personal relationship with me.

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    "[..] trying to pretend that it has a personal relationship with me". This may well be the point. Many companies adopt this approach as an attempt to be user friendly, although it is not to everyone's taste. See also wackaging Commented Nov 6, 2018 at 16:08
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    To me, "I found you this" is slightly different from "I found this for you". The latter suggests you might have asked me to find it, or I was searching intentionally for some reason. In the former case I could have stumbled upon something at a thrift store and I got it because I knew you'd like it. But of course this is a very subtle and questionable shade of meaning; broadly the two phrases are very similar.
    – amalloy
    Commented Nov 6, 2018 at 18:28
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This is an example of usage of an indirect object. This often happens with the preposition to;

I gave the book to you
I gave you the book

Note that the indirect object you can follow the direct object the book, with the preposition to, or it can follow the verb and lose the preposition. This also happens occasionally with the preposition for

I found these great results for you!
I found you these great results!

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