I simply happened to detect a fairly interesting tool today.

I was trying to seek out a word for “Folks that are behind the times” for my previous blog post.  I did a number of searches in Google without avail and eventually started scouring for a tool that did a reverse lookup on a word.  A tool where I’d provide the definition, and it might offer me some words that matched that definition.  What I discovered was Onelook.com’s Reverse Dictionary.

Reverse Dictionaries permit you to “Describe an idea” so as to find words that match that description.

Cool Stuff, especially for all of us non-harvard graduates.

What I realize the most fascinating though is all of the uses for this tool.  It is truly a terribly good search engine.  You’d be suprized the type of answers you could get from asking a selection of questions.  Here are a number of potential applications that OneLook describes:

– Realize a word, when you know its definition, [or some of the definition].
– Explore related concepts. Baseball, clouds, cities.
– Generate an inventory of words in some category.  I.E. Large Birds, Inexperienced fruit, Canadian authors.
– Answer basic indentification questions.  What’s the capital of Vietnam, Who is massive birds friend on Sesame Street. What is the longest River in the globe

In reality Onelook is indexing a lot of more then just dictionaries to search out these answers.  They index encyclopedia’s and other reference sites as well.

I dont understand regarding you guys, but if I had a terribly giant amount of money, I might take into account attempting to buy their technology.  There are a lot of times I wish the key search engines might do a number of the things that they are.  Ask.com (askjeeves) does some of this, but you cant get lists from Ask, its typically websites that come up that need you to sift through many pages to seek out your answers.

For all of you content mongers out there, this type of technology may feed some very interesting sites.

I’d love to see some kind of API.

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