Robert_Charlton - 5:28 pm on Sep 29, 2007 (gmt 0)

Sorry that's a lot of rubbish since they hard link to it...

I've been talking about the organic rankings, which was what the original poster was asking about.

Why don't you try to type in define:widget into your favorite SE and look in the top right where it links to.

Actually, that's not the way the Answers.com links appear. The Google define: operator displays a whole page of Google Definitions, which are definitions obtained from spidered results. They've been discussed here numerous times.

The hard links to Answers.com definitions appear in the upper right of the blue Web bar, along the approximate number of pages and the time of retrieval. They're a fairly recent addition, clearly part of Google's ongoing experimentation with its serps displays. The blue bar has also included News, Images, Products, etc when applicable. To get the "definition" link for widgets, you merely need to do a search for that term.

I'm assuming that Google is licensing the "definition" content from Answers.com. Not sure how that plays out if Answers.com is using Wikipedia content, but that's another topic.

The dictionary definitions that Answers.com returns are clearly marked with copyrights, and I assume that Answers.com is paying for them, or is exchanging links for them, or has a legal staff working on the problem.

It's not unusual these days to see content being pulled from many sources. Google Local, eg, is pulling reviews from sites that I know are subscription sites, and Google is undoubtedly paying for this material. Often, those reviews were contributed by users of the review site for free. This is known as user-generated content... and if people here have big problems with it, they should probably stop posting on forums and review sites in general.

In spite of the Google hard link, based on searches I've tried, I don't see any apparent organic favoritism being given to Answers.com. In fact, when I've search for, say, a sentence in quotes from an Answers.com definition, the original source or sources are there, but the Answers.com page generally doesn't appear unless you click "show more results" or add "&filter=0" to the Google search url. Hardly seems like favoritism or quid pro quo to me.

Duplication is tricky in Google, though, and it's very much query dependent, so I can't say these definitions won't rank on other searches.

What surprises me a bit is why Google isn't returning its own define: operator results rather than the Answers.com results when you click the "definition" link. Might be a concession to the credibility of a hand edited dictionary, or it might be that Google is running various tests to measure user satisfaction.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:36 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2007]