The calculator is pretty cool but there's no shortage of calculators. Thankfully we don't often need to know the square root of two teaspoonfuls. An easy to search glossary, on the other hand, is a much rarer and therefore more precious utility. In a recent bigmouthmedia news story we announced the launch of our RSS feed. If that left you wondering what the heck a RSS feed is then a trip to Google and a search for "define: RSS" (without the quotes) would have answered that question.
The definition function goes live in what has been a hard month for Google. Competitors are consolidating and making serious attempts to carve out some of Google's huge market share for themselves. Googlenacks, results that promise thousands of results but show much less, are more common than this time last month and blog noise is at new heights.
There's no sign, yet, of an updated Google toolbar that brings onboard the calculator and glossary functions. The calculator and glossary work as standard searches, so there's no pressing need for specialised buttons, even though the site search feature has one.
Currently, Google's toolbar handles dictionary lookups by checking against dictionary.com and despite the glossary feature there's no suggestion that this is going to change.
What's the definition of Google? A quick check at http://www.google.com / search?q=define:google tells us that Google is "the most important spidering search engine by far".
