Search engines may soon kill off dictionary sites

By Chadwick Matlin

updated 7:33 p.m. ET Sept. 23, 2009

Ostensibly, this is the story of dictionary Web sites and their impending demise. But really, this is the story of the oxpecker. I ask your patience while I get ornithological; we’ve got a metaphor to spin.

Meet the oxpecker bird, a plucky, selfless little thing. Its life amounts—as for so many of us—to nothing but consumption for the sake of others. The oxpecker is a helpful friend to the bigger game of the sub-Saharan grasslands. Giraffes, wildebeests, and cattle all welcome oxpeckers onto their hides in exchange for a master cleanse. The oxpeckers, meanwhile, feed off of the parasites, insects, and ticks that they’re picking off their gracious hosts. It’s a symbiotic relationship, one of those quirks of nature that keeps an ecosystem churning. You scratch my back, I’ll fatten yours.

Most interesting for our purposes is the dynamic between the two animals. It’s a mutually beneficial partnership: The oxpecker provides a service the animal can’t manage in-house, and the animal offers the oxpecker a parasitic cornucopia. A beautiful consequence of evolution, nature organically assigning roles to different animals.

Dictionary Web sites, as you may have surmised, are akin to the oxpeckers. The only way they can sustain themselves is by borrowing resources from far larger game—search engines, in this case. All sorts of traffic finds its way to an online dictionary through a search engine, which means that all sorts of advertising revenue depends on those clicks coming through. On the Internet, pageviews equal revenue, especially when you pack dozens of ads on a page, as the dictionary sites do. Without search engines feeding the dictionaries traffic, the reference sites probably couldn’t survive.

But search engines are smarter than giraffes. They’ve always had the ability to evolve and start providing definitions on their own. Thus, the dictionary sites have always been in a precarious spot; their hosts could grow the equivalent of a backscratcher at any moment and put the oxpecker out of a job. And now it finally appears that search engines have had enough. Without warning, the evolution has already begun; dictionary sites are more endangered than ever.

To understand the way things once were, let’s look at Google. The market leader in search hasn’t significantly changed the way it deals with definitions in years, and its presentation is a useful time capsule. Open up Google in a new tab and run a search for a single, SAT-caliber word. Let’s use loquacious as our example. Don’t know what it means? Perfect; that makes it the kind of thing you would Google. Google, you’ll notice, doesn’t give you a definition itself—it just links off to a bunch of other dictionary sites.

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And here’s where things get interesting. The definition isn’t in any of the search returns’ little two-line descriptions, either. That’s because they’re purposefully trying to obscure the results. Every site on the Internet can suggest to Google what to pull as those two-line descriptions. Google doesn’t have to listen—as we’ll see later—but more often than not its algorithms don’t bother bypassing the hand-fed description. Dictionary sites know this and purposefully keep their definitions out of the suggested description. Instead they insert the requested word into a generic few sentences. Take a look at Dictionary.com’s description:

Loquacious—Definition of Loquacious at Dictionary.com a free online dictionary with pronunciation, synonyms, and translation of Loquacious. Word of the Day and Crossword Puzzles.

Keeping definitions out of search engine returns is a major business initiative. Web sites are always hesitant to release traffic figures, but Merriam-Webster’s electronic product director told me that a “majority” of their traffic comes from search engines.* Whatever the exact percentage is, it would surely drop if definitions were displayed in the search returns. Why click through to the actual site if you already have your answer before you get there? (*Correction: This story originally misspelled Merriam-Webster. It has been corrected throughout.)

This is the way that things were (and for Google, still are). But it’s not the way that things will be. Search engines are increasingly expected to be more than just a portal to what we need online, but they also provide us shortcuts to the answers that we seek, minimizing the number of clicks that it takes to find them. I want to go to the search engine that gets me to my information the fastest—and that means I shouldn’t have to click through to get a definition. Google’s chief competitor has already bought into this philosophy. Microsoft treats definitions in a wholly different, more selfish way than Google does.

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, shamelessly borrows the dictionary content without any of the typical kickbacks. Bing has figured out a cheap and effective way to harness dictionary sites’ information that heightens the user experience. Go ahead and plug loquacious into Bing. You’ll see an in-line definition, this time pulled from Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia. (The same one that they’re discontinuing at the end of the year.)

But then scroll down to the next return, from dictionary.com. You’ll see something different from Google’s results; the definition is right there in the search return. Bing has ignored dictionary.com’s recommended description and apparently cut straight through to the good stuff. This shifts the power dynamic of the search-engine-dictionary-site relationship. By reaping all the benefits, Bing’s ability to repay the favor is limited. Remember, people don’t need to click on a link if they already know what awaits on the other side.

And there’s even more dictionary.com data in the Bing framework. Hover your mouse over that dictionary.com search link and you’ll see a vertical bar pop up on the right side of the return. Move your mouse over that and you’ll get even more information imported from the site—pronunciation, etymology, derivatives of the word.

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