Net Industry

Google defining Yahoo?

Today I was doing some research for school. On my search I stumbled across a feature in Google named "definitions".

It works as follows: you type "define:" followed by the word you want defined. Of course, curious as I am, I wondered how Google would be defined. Because they say that Google definitions, "(...) get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources." and "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". This suggests that there is no filtering what so ever on the given results, right?

Well after typing "define:google", it returned 8 results. A bit less then I expected, as Google is "Currently the most important spidering search engine by far". Believing of course the first result in the list.

Then I typed "define:yahoo". Yahoo being the biggest competitor of Google. As a result I got around 20 hits... quite more then on my previous search. It became even more interesting when I actually read the results. The second definition in the result list I got, was the following: "A Web directory created by a couple of guys from Stanford who now have more money than the entire country of Luxembourg. Rumour has it they own one business suit between them." What?!

Apparently the Google search engine for definitions considers the word "rumour" as being part of a definition. Very interesting indeed.

posted by d669 @ 5:30 PM