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Google Goes to Answers.com
tod_miller writes "Google has changed its definitions link from dictionary.com to answers.com. A google search for juxtaposition shows the effect. What is interesting is that answers.com pulls information from wikipedia.org, which was provided bandwidth by google.com [and now Google is providing a service that will be used worldwide to pull information off Wikipedia]. Aside from having both a dictionary.com and a wikipedia.org search box in FireFox (as well as Google) the definition link on Google is still useful and I regularly check it for obscure uses or exact definitions of words. Now it uses answers.com we do not get all the different forms of the word, but we do get any medical or wikipedic information. Interestingly, answers.com does not use Google AdSense, but commission junction that looks like it. There is no announcement yet from Google of their change." This change took place several weeks ago, as players of e-scrabble and other compulsive word-checkers might have noticed. Update: 03/13 23:20 GMT by T : (Also mentioned in passing last month.) Update: 03/14 02:13 GMT by T : Brion Vibber writes: "Google does *not* provide any bandwidth to Wikipedia at this time, except in the sense that they 'use up' our bandwidth when people using
their search engine come to our site. ;)"
Dupe
However, I would still like to see definitions of the word. I found that quite useful. Perhaps they should also pull from Wiktionary?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Google Local, Definitions, & Registrar. Perhaps Slashdot should ask them whether they've already run the story?
Why not pulling it directly from the source?
Slashdot posted this over a month ago. A simple search for answers.com would reveal that.
That said, this is definitely a good thing. Dictionary.com is fine and all, but answers.com provides a lot more information for most words. It'll be interesting what happens once Google links to even more Wikipedia content. I think it'll become a little more well known and more used as a result. Most non-Slashdot crowd still haven't heard of Wikipedia. Perhaps being linked prominently from Google would change that.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
i never liked dictionary.com anyways, lol thank god
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Who else thinks Google is going to take over the world... starting with knowing everything and puting everyone out of business!
It's a dupe. And old news.
/., so Caveat Emptor.
But this is
But the most of you about to whinge aren't buyers, since you didn't pay for the servise, so quit whinging about a good service you use for free and read the next story.
Or the comments here, like this one.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Frankly, Wikipedia is not ready for the big time. The definitions they have for many words are pretty inadequate. Greater scrutiny and the juxtaposition of a 'real' dictionary with the wiki version should highlight the glaring deficiencies. But really - what is wiki's presence in the definitions list going to provide? Certainly nothing authoritative or expert or even accurate?
This change happened weeks ago.
I submitted it as a story and it was rejected, hmmm.....
i didn't mean google site rather the bluetooth rifle site ..
coming to the answer.com vc dictionary.com debate, i used to frequent dictionary.com b4 i realized google gave the meaning .. its more useful sometimes when you are not sure of its usage in a specific instance.
You might want to correct the false statement that Google is providing hosting services to Wikipedia. Google has made such a proposal only.
author,
Does anyone find it a bit disconcerting that answers.com gets ad revenue for wikipedia's content. Exactly how much is google funding wikipedia? IMO, they should fund the entire operation considering how much money they (and answers.com) must be making off the content. Think of how much traffic google must generate to the "definition" link in each search.
Respect to the dupes, I suppose. Still interesting.
bloodclotjungletekno
They will put their ads on Answers.com page. They probably couldn't do this with Wikipedia or the license forbids it.
Watch and see.
Of course there are bugs in the content of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and the other Wikimedia Foundation projects. But then there are also bugs in Britannica and bugs in Webster's. No reference is bug-free[1].
[1] The faithful allege that Handbook for the Human Soul is perfect, but even there, translations from the original ancient Greek and Hebrew can be dodgy.
For those of you wondering the same thing, since the post didn't really discuss where the feature is located, if you google query for "juxtaposition" (or any other word), at the top right portion of the results page there is a little information about how long the query took: [definition] is the link which the post is referring to, it links to answers.com with the definition of the word.
I'm happy about this change, when I noticed it a couple weeks ago. Dictionary.com is good, but all it only offers definitions. If I wanted those, I could use the google parameter define:WORD. Answers gives a great deal more information. Almost everything I want can be found there -- and to think, I didn't even know about it before google started using it (although I did know about wikipedia).
It's also not as annoying, ad-wise, as dictionary.com.
It'd be nice for google to make their own answers.com type site. Not sure if they will though.
by juxtapositioning lots of curious /.er's in a query for a exquisite word.
Compulsive word-checkers? Hey, that's nice. I must check it out. Now!
Is it just me or have the moderators gotten pretty lax lately? Lots of repeat stories and poor editing IMO. - My $0.02 :/
It seems Answers.com's pronounce feature (type in 'time' in search and click the little speaker) doesn't work in Firefox?
Works fine in IE, btw.
Now people will be astrotrufing Wikipedia with sales pitches for their products. Not that that is necessarily bad but the content will tend toward not being less concise. It could become more of a junkpile of stuff like the web is now as opposed to the well defined concise descriptions that they have now. Perhaps some form of moderation should be applied.
I love the font they use on answers.com. What is it?
[Off-topic] Are you reading Stephen Donaldson at the moment? I can't think of anywhere else I've ever met the word...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
This is news?
As noted, this isn't anything new, or really interesting for that matter. I saw it a while back, and although my first response was negative since I'm use to dictionary.com for looking up words, I really don't mind it.
It's whinge. That's a real word. We use it all the time in Australia. HTH.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is actually the interesting part of the article:
answers.com does not use Google AdSense
It would seem a natural for them to do it, given all the traffic they get from Google... seems like a no-brainer, really.
What Slashdot hasn't covered about Google is Yahoo!'s answer to AdSense. Technically, it's Yahoo! news, but it could materially affect Google's profits...
EricThis means I can no longer reliably use Google's definition links for dictionary terms. I'm no fan of Wikipedia. There's just too much opinion and conjecture in the definitions for me.
Visit Lockjaw's Lair. He won't bite.
The first time I had ever used Wikipedia was when Hunter S Thompson died.
Upon going to his page, and reading it thoroughly, I was treated to the little known fact that "he was a big supporter of child-pornography".
This of course came as a shock to me - so I started trying to find ANY coroborating evidence elsewhere.
Of course there was none, and within a few minutes the Wiki page was corrected of the stupiditiy.
With this, I have very little faith in the reliability of Wiki pages. Sure, I happened to know enough about HTS to realize that that statement was probably false, and knew enough to double-check it. But what if I didn't? What about the other X thousand people who read the page at that time, and never bothered refreshing?
This IS a fundamental problem with Wikis.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
"Interestingly, answers.com does not use Google AdSense, but commission junction that looks like it." Really? Sure doesn't look like it. Great, an old story with 2 false facts. I didn't know Dan Rather wrote for Slashdot.
What always throws me off with these sites that reuse the WikiPedia content is that they aren't editable. They give full access to the wiki's end product, they just don't actually have a wiki.
I'm not sure whether or not this hurts the wiki, but it definitely bothers me. On the one hand, most of these sites are more targetted towards the general populace, which has a history of destroying any open forum it gets its hands on. On the other hand, people reading answers.com have no way of knowing that they could be contributing to such a beautiful resource.
I wish that these sites would try to give a bit more back to WikiPedia, at least by making it easy for people to learn that the real WikiPedia exists. After all, they are somewhat dependent on WikiPedia for their continued existence.
Well, there are certainly lots of stubs and substubs, but as you say it's about quality and not quantity. I suggest you look at the featured articles. I have also started off a baseline experiment (the name may change) to find the best static page for each featured article. An example baseline is on the CUPS article. With the experiment I hope to find a properly reviewed page that shows the most accurate information. Then we mark this revision as the "baseline" - the most accurate revision of the featured article. Not sure if it will fly with Wikipedians, but I've given it a shot.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Since dictionary.com has found a way to get around Safari's pop-up blocker, I have no use for them. Glad Google has thought the same.
Go here:
www.onelook.com
All the dictionaries that matter*.
* - except the OED, which believes more in money than in the free flow of information
As I recall reading (I don't remember where), one of the reasons for the switch was because answers.com is free ie. you can access everything without paying for "premium" services. For example, answers.com has a pronounciation feature for free, whereas dictionary.com charges for it. Don't know how true this is because I lost my source.
Dictionary: http://www.elook.org/dictionary/
Thesuarus: http://www.elook.org/thesaurus/
And FOLDOC: http://www.elook.org/computing/
No ads, lightning fast results. Found a link to it at my compsci course website.
If anyone's looking for a simple, straightforward dictionary search that covers a wide variety of databases (including "The Devil's Dictionary" by Ambrose Bierce :D), I recommend giving dict.org a shot.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
More interesting to me than the topic (which I noticed about a month ago as I've always used the dictionary feature of google) is the use of the term "wikipedic" in the article summary.
Just as "google" has become a verb, it appears that we've now witnessed the birth of yet another site-gone-word... this time, as an adjective.
-David
Why not Dict.org? I find that they are the best, due to a nice, clean, and easy to use interface. The only problem is the lack of decent spell check, but other than that it's great! (Especially since it has multiple dictionaries)
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
They should form a consortium to make the current
owners richer and then release the whole thing
as open source (with controls for integrity).
Selling the full CD set for $10 would probably
pay for everything better than current price models,
but it should be public like support of basic
education in reading.
Above post is a joke. Think about it.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Answers.com search plugin for Firefox
It's not SlashDot, it's not FireFox, it's not MicroSoft.. when do people start getting these right? Is it only us trolls who know that size does matter?
Answers.com is violating the license in which some content (particularly photographs) are included in the wikipedia. For instance, the I gave a license to the following image Lemonade to the Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons share alike license. It is used in the article Lemonade.
This image is reproduced in answers.com: lemonade without any mention of the author (me). That is against the license I placed on the image. It is linked from the article Lemonade.
Wasn't Google invented as a tool to search through books?
Why don't they just add 1 book called the dictionary to their own site to solve the problem?
I looked in answers.com under ten and found a lot of stuff about ten but only about six definitions - most of them widely known already and dealing with ten as a number.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I use a dictionary as that - a dictionary - a place to get definitions and usage for words, and the more (and the more unusual) definitions, the better.
In my opinion, the information from answers.com has more vebose information with respect to basic definitions, translations, etc., as well as a lot of eye candy, but has much less depth lexicographically. It doesn't seem as useful qua dictionary as dictionary.com was.
That is all.
No, the license doesn't forbid it.
Nothing to see here, move along....
Perhaps you could clarify something for me, since I've done some research on Wikipedia policies and can't come up with a valid answer.
Are all submissions to Wikipedia required to be licensed under GFDL? (The submission page says so, the download page says not.) If that's the case, why can images be tagged with other licenses? Is that like dual-licensing, and if so, can't Wikipedia mirrors like answers.com follow the GFDL and ignore the other license?
If you think, given the above, you should be able to dictate how your (very beautiful IMHO) image is used, what should the mirrors do to comply with all the different licenses when doing automated imports of dumps?
I noticed the answers.com page of your image doesn't provide the obligatory GFDL credit of Wikipedia. Would that suffice for you?
It seems to me that automated dumps of Wikimedia aren't that easy after all if you have to wade through a dozen different licenses instead of one. What balance do you suggest to make sure everybody's happy?
Yes, it's true. We're evil. We were hoping nobody would notice, but I guess you found us out. Ah well, too bad. Back to pillaging, raping women and children and all the other evil things we Oxfordians get up to.
Ta ta,
OED
As stated on the website:"To see a definition for a word or phrase, simply type the word "define," then a space, and then the word(s) you want defined. If Google has seen a definition for the word or phrase on the Web, it will retrieve that information and display it at the top of your search results." (http://www.google.com/help/features.html# accessed March 14, 2005). Google uses different sources for definitions.
I for one like the interface of Answers. Dictionary.com had a terrible design, and every time I went there I thought I was on one of those placeholder ad sites - bright blue and bad fonts are a no-no these days, when it's so easy to create a nice looking site even with simple space-saving css or tables or something at least visually appealing.
A person claiming to be you [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142358&cid=11 929566] mentioned on Slashdot.org that you believed that the image [[:Image:Limonadedmg.jpg]] was not licensed with the GFDL but only with the CC-SA license. As the Slashdot post illustrated, that makes life difficult for reusers, who can't expect that the GFDL license will be sufficient. To avoid this, the upload agreement makes all uploads by the creator GFDL licensesd ''in addition to'' any other licenses the uploader may wish to grant.
Please either confirm that you are willing to grant a GFDL license or, at your option, either list it for deletion (wrong license) or let me know so that I can do so. We've no interest at all in compelling you to license it in a way contrary to your wishes but are trying to maintain some consistency for reusers.
The Commons project does accept a broader range of images and you may wish to consider placing it there instead if you don't wish to grant a GFDL license but do still want to make it available for others to use.
You should also consider that your work is arguably a derivative work of the tent design, the logo on the tent and the design of the lemonade squeezer. For that reason, while you may be releasing your portion of the work under one license, you may be making fair use of the work of others, making the combined work fair use. Fair use is not accepted at Commons. It is accepted at en.wikipedia.org but that would require the GFDL license in addition to any others.
Thanks for your assistance in resolving the licensing misunderstanding.
A comparable response should be expected for any similar situations.
Expected reaction: use of new throwaway accounts and loss of the useful anon editor indicator which currently makes it easier to handle vandalism.
Likely consequence: it'll probably make it harder to identify and deal with problems because more of them will be concealed behind throwaway accounts.
Lots of solutions look easy at first, until you think how people will react to them. Then you have to design for that expected reaction. And ideally for a few levels of counter-reaction and reaction beyond that. Some form of delayed visibility is likely to be useful but confining it to only anonymous edits is likely not to be a good approach.
...good-old engrish.com?
Hi, I am curious how answers.com grab information from other sites.. they use a script or something like that? Does wikipedia agree with people borrowing content? tks for some light here.
I see you've opted for 2 and 3. Unfortunately this is simply anecdotal. The problem that Wikipedia is as good, or bad, as its last edit has not been addressed. You can't vote for the truth.
Why not just say, as Agent Mulder would, "I want to believe..." ?
It seems that Answers.com is following this thread, because by clicking the picture, credit is given to you.
Did you write to Answers.com requesting credit before accusing them of violating your copyright? Fairplay dictates that you give them a chance, unless, of course, you think that both they and Wikipedia intentionally were committing IP fraud.
Yes, I wrote to them and they acted very quickly. I give them a lot of credit for it.
I am still concerned with the fact that images are easy to detach from their creators names. I am wondering what is the best alternative. I think it is to embed metadata in the image that can be displayed along with it, so if the text is detached from the photo, it is still possible to know who created it.
use www.m-w.com that's better than dictionary.com or answers.com