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Google Goes to Answers.com

Posted by timothy on Sun Mar 13, 2005 06:12 PM
from the abruptness dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
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. ;)"
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  • Dupe (Score:3, Informative)

    by Paul McMahon (854063) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:16PM (#11928587)
    Dupe [slashdot.org]
    • It may be a dupe, but neither the original article, nor the current one has a comment about the Answers.com definition of slashdot. I've had that in my sig for over a month (and I missed the previous article) but I was amused at the 'slashdot == chip and dip' response I got...

      • The missing Google news (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Eric Giguere (42863) on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:14PM (#11928908) Homepage Journal

        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 [ericgiguere.com]. Technically, it's Yahoo! news, but it could materially affect Google's profits...

        Eric

          • I think the idiot explanation works best. Look at the source for one of the definition pages, you'll see the JavaScript code for an AdSense ad block near the bottom:

            <script language="JavaScript">
            <!--
            google_ad_client = 'ca-gurunet_120x600';
            google_ad_width = 120;
            google_ad_height = 600;
            google_ad_format = '120x600_sln';
            google_safe = 'high';
            google_alternate_ad_url = 'http://www.answers.com/main/default_ad.html';
            google_encoding = 'utf8';
            google_contents = 'paradigm';
            google_

  • And Slashdot Too! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheFlyingGoat (161967) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:20PM (#11928614) Homepage Journal
    Slashdot posted this [slashdot.org] 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.
    • "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"

      Quantity is not always good. I noticed this right away and wrote to Google after my first couple trips there. They made some changes, I thought, but all the crappy bloat is back--translations in 14 languages, and pictures. Fuck! Shit takes for-fucking-ever to load compared to the nice, light, simple dictionary.com pages. I do *not* need all this crap 99 times out of 1

      • Re:And Slashdot Too! (Score:4, Informative)

        by pHatidic (163975) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:39PM (#11928722) Homepage
        Wikipedia is already the 69th most popular website in the english website according to alexa.com, how much more mainstream can you get?
      • Makes sense for now, but how long before it becomes recognized and accepted as just as valid as today's peer-review academic publishing?

        Never, just like encyclopedias have never been a viable source for research content. And while Wikipedia has some advantages over Brittanica and such, it is still an elaborate form of encyclopedia, covering a wide bredth of topics with varying degrees of depth.

      • Re:And Slashdot Too! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kiltedtaco (213773) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:43PM (#11928738) Homepage
        Hopefully never.

        Wikipedia is not peer-reviewed in the classical sense. It is not a replacement for peer-reviewed research. It is not a replacement for primary sources or anything else. It is a replacement for the encyclopedia. Do you trust encyclopaedia britanica as much as academic journals? I hope not.

        If you're conducting serious research, you are definitly not going to be using an encyclopaedia beyond the first 5 minutes. Wikipedia won't change that. It's good if you just want a quick overview of a subject or a what books an author wrote or something, but it's not a replacement for actual research.
        • Granted, it could never be viable as a research source as it stands today (that is, as you said: nothing more than an encyclopedia). What I suppose I was more so aiming for, however, is the acceptability of the concept of Wiki. Applied to the academic setting as a source of common knowledge continually reviewed by people who do know what they're talking about (that is, the academics themselves), it could become something much more powerful.

          I guess, though, that you could then say it would look a lot like

  • Maybe it will help improve wictionary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Skippy_kangaroo (850507) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:20PM (#11928623)
    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?

    • 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 [wikipedia.org] and bugs in Webster's [snopes.com]. No reference is bug-free[1].

      [1] The faithful allege that Handbook for the Human Soul [gospelcom.net] is perfect, but even there, translations from the original ancient Greek and Hebrew can be dodgy.

      • I frequently use Wikipedia. I also frequently use Britannica.

        Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia where a "bug" has resulted in me being told to "eat shit and die" by a current event listing.

        I love Wikipedia, but it's in an entirely different league. As wonderful a resource as it is, it embodies the very principles that have my professors telling me that all Internet citations are unacceptable.

        Imagine if Britannica devoted the resources to extensively tracking Wikipedia errors, then claiming corrections ag

        • In general, I use it (like any encyclopedia) as a good "starting source," i.e. a place to get basic background information to start real research.

          So.... One of the real issues is that you have a strong issue in encyclopedias of scholarly fads. So no encyclopedia should be assumed to be an authority on anything. It is a jack-of-all-topics-master-of-none sort of issue.

          Interestingly when my father in law fell ill, I was able to use wikipedia to get good information regarding his (rare) illness (an autoimmune disorder called ITP). It was not my only reference, but it was the clearest and most concise one I could find.

    • Problems with Wikis... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by still_sick (585332) * on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:19PM (#11928932)
      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.
      • Or, perhaps, it is not so sumple. Perhaps it is more a problem of education. Had you known that proper wiki-based research should include not only viewing the articles on the topics you seek, but also a glance at the recent history of the page, and the Talk pages, to see how many "eyeballs" have seen the page, and if there are any recent questionable edits. Unlike a book encyclopedia, a Wiki is a two-way medium, and you can't ignore that fact and try to treat it like other one-way media.

        • Re:Problems with Wikis... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Donny Smith (567043) on Sunday March 13 2005, @11:07PM (#11929949)
          >Had you known that proper wiki-based research should include not only viewing the articles on the topics you seek, but also a glance at the recent history of the page, and the Talk pages, to see how many "eyeballs" have seen the page, and if there are any recent questionable edits.

          Pleeeeze! It's like telling people that proper Linux use includes viewing source code, fiddling kernel recompiles and checking recent diffs in the CVS tree.

          If that's the way to use Wikipedia, then I'd rather do my own Google search on the term and check several trustworthy sources (usually a 3:2:1 mixture of commercial, academic and personal sites).
          Soon a day will come when there will be a site that will automate this and show stuff on-the-fly (similar to Google News) instead of relying on the hopeless method of using actual people to copy and rewrite content as Wikipedia does.
      • Supposedly it only takes an average of 4 minutes for a WikiPedia vandalism to get corrected, pretty much regardless of the popularity of the article. I find that pretty impressive.
      • Jimmy Wales (who started Wikipedia) has asked really nicely for a feature where anonymous edits don't show up for ten minutes to anonymous viewers (logged-in editors' changes would show up immediately, logged-in editors would always see the current version). Unfortunately the devs say it would be a nightmare to program, but it's obviously desirable and people are thinking seriously about how to do it.

    • Re:Maybe it will help improve wictionary (Score:5, Informative)

      by Buzzard2501 (834714) on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:58PM (#11929092)
      Well, Wikipedia certainly does a better job of describing juxtaposition that Dictionary.com

      Dictionary.com
      The act or an instance of juxtaposing or the state of being juxtaposed.
      Wikipedia
      Generally, juxtaposition, or contrasting is an act or instance of placing two things close together or side by side, in order to show unlikeness or differences, to note the opposite qualities of the two, etc.


      In music it is an abrupt change of elements.

      In film the position of shots next to one another is intended to create meaning within the audiences mind.

      In literature it occurs when two images that are otherwise not commonly brought together appear side by side or structural close together - thereby creating the reader to stop and reconsider the meaning of the text through the contrasting images/ideas/motifs.

      Modernist poetry played extensivley with juxtaposing images, inserting unrelated fragments togther in order to create wonder and interest in readers.

      Which would you prefer?

          • Re:Stubs (Score:5, Interesting)

            by ratsnapple tea (686697) on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:52PM (#11929071)
            And what about the featured article removal candidates [wikipedia.org]? The existence of these would seem to indicate that the quality of articles, over time, tends not towards brilliance, but mediocrity.

            In the past, I've vastly improved articles in the 'pedia (earning much praise in the process, so "improvement" isn't just my ego speaking) and returned to them after many months, only to find them unreadably disorganized or studded dangerously with errors. To me, this asymptotic approach to shitsville is even more damning than the fact that featured articles don't usually remain so for long.

            • Re:Stubs (Score:4, Interesting)

              by ta bu shi da yu (687699) on Sunday March 13 2005, @08:17PM (#11929181) Homepage
              Not necessarily. It is possible, however it doesn't tend to happen. One thing is that the articles have remained of high quality but our selection criteria has become tougher. During the "brilliant prose" days we had some articles that were pretty good (see for instance triangle [wikipedia.org], however we recently removed this - not because it got worse, but because had it been submitted to FAC today it would not get through.

              Incidently, I'm always glad to see someone who helps improve articles, and so I thank you for doing this. That's why I've added my baseline experiment: we can refer people to the "baseline", which people can't modify. As with any wiki, errors and disorganisation can occur. I've seen it myself [wikipedia.org].

  • Wikipedia information incorrect (Score:5, Informative)

    by A. Brate (588407) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:21PM (#11928629) Homepage Journal
    You might want to correct the false statement that Google is providing hosting services to Wikipedia. Google has made such a proposal only.

  • How much is google funding? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aixou (756713) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:22PM (#11928632)
    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.

    • "Does anyone find it a bit disconcerting that answers.com gets ad revenue for wikipedia's content. Exactly how much is google funding wikipedia?"

      I don't. If wikipedia.org wants to start making a little money, then God bless 'em. Wanting to cover costs, or even to make some profit, != being evil.

    • Re:How much is google funding? (Score:4, Informative)

      by fm6 (162816) on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:14PM (#11928903) Homepage Journal
      Does anyone find it a bit disconcerting that answers.com gets ad revenue for wikipedia's content.
      They're one of many. Wikipedia content is licensed under the GFDL [wikipedia.org], which means anybody can use Wikipedia content to create their own online reference. There are many of these, but Answers.com is the only one I've seen that isn't a complete joke. In fact, Answers.com has a lot more to it than just reformatted Wikipedia entries, as you'll soon see if you browse their site.

  • No announcement (Score:5, Informative)

    by darkpurpleblob (180550) * on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:25PM (#11928650)
    There is no announcement yet from Google of their change.
    No there isn't, and I don't see any reason why they need to make one. However Marissa Meyer, Product Manager for Google explains the switch to answers.com [kottke.org]:
    This decision was driven off of concern for our user experience. We are not paying answers.com for this service nor are they paying us. They were willing to work with us and design a website that we felt represented an improvement for our users over what was offered on dictionary.com (no pop-ups, dense information presentation).

  • Artical unclear... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Paralizer (792155) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:30PM (#11928681) Homepage
    I never noticed this feature before, so when I read the post I had no idea what it was talking about, other than something google was doing had changed from linking to dictionary.com to answers.com.

    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:
    Results 1 - 10 of about 887,000 for juxtaposition [definition]. (0.10 seconds)
    [definition] is the link which the post is referring to, it links to answers.com with the definition of the word.

  • Good change (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SteelV (839704) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:31PM (#11928685)
    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.
  • Compulsive word-checkers? Hey, that's nice. I must check it [answers.com] out. Now!

  • Astroturfing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KidSock (150684) on Sunday March 13 2005, @06:43PM (#11928743)
    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.

  • Don't go there. (Score:5, Informative)

    by blair1q (305137) on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:32PM (#11928994) Journal
    Go here:

    www.onelook.com [onelook.com]

    All the dictionaries that matter*.

    * - except the OED, which believes more in money than in the free flow of information

  • It's also free (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rm999 (775449) on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:42PM (#11929036)
    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.

  • answers.com misses an edit link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Eloquence (144160) on Sunday March 13 2005, @07:52PM (#11929074) Homepage
    While answers.com is a fully compliant Wikipedia mirror in terms of respecting the requirements of the GNU Free Documentation License, it would be very nice and beneficial for both answers.com and Wikipedia if they could provide a prominent direct link to edit the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia can only work if people keep editing and improving its content, and that effect is lost on read-only mirrors. I have sent that suggestion to GuruNet (the company operating answers.com), and here's what I got back:
    That's a very good idea, Erik, and one that we even discussed with Jimmy Wales when he visited our offices earlier this year. We're still working out how the Answers.com Wikipedia relationship is going to work, but I would not at all be surprised to see something like what you suggest down the road.
    So, hopefully they will add an edit link soon. It is also notable that GuruNet has expressed an interest in supporting Wikimedia in various ways (the specifics are not public at this point).

  • Violation of license of content of the wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dgerman (78602) on Sunday March 13 2005, @09:43PM (#11929566) Homepage
    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 [wikipedia.org] to the Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons share alike license [creativecommons.org]. It is used in the article Lemonade [wikipedia.org].

    This image is reproduced in answers.com: lemonade [answers.com] without any mention of the author (me). That is against the license I placed on the image. It is linked from the article Lemonade [answers.com].
    • Thanks for your report of a copyright infringment. I've removed the image you uploaded from the en.wikipedia.org Lemonade article, so it'll gradually be removed from all reusers. For the benefit of readers here, here is a copy of the note I just placed on the talk page of the uploader:

      A person claiming to be you [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142358&cid=1 1 929566] mentioned on Slashdot.org that you believed that the image [[:Image:Limonadedmg.jpg]] was not licensed with the GFDL but only with t

  • Geniuses at Google (Score:3, Insightful)

    by christowang (590054) <chrisNO@SPAMsysice.com> on Sunday March 13 2005, @10:11PM (#11929678) Homepage
    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?

  • A change for the worse (Score:3, Informative)

    by frank_adrian314159 (469671) on Sunday March 13 2005, @10:54PM (#11929884) Homepage
    A music acquaintance of mine was asking about the meaning of the notational ten. used in a piece of music. Looking in dictionary.com, I found the musical definition easily as an abbreviation of the term tenuto: So as to be held for the full time value; sustained. Used chiefly as a directionI also found about twenty other definitions.

    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.

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