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Previous: Amazon.com shopping cart | Main | Next: Sign for employee ideas
November 16, 2004 12:01 AM
Broken: Dictionary.com error
Update Dec. 22, 2004: Alex Burka points out that this problem is now fixed. Nice work to the Dictionary.com folks!
Original post below.
- - -
There's a problem on dictionary.com.
Search on "comraderie".
Dictionary.com replies:
No entry found for comraderie.
Did you mean comaraderie?
Click on that suggestion, "comaraderie", and you get...
No entry found for comaraderie.
Did you mean comaraderie?
Why is Dictionary.com intent on serving up non-words as suggestions? And why can't it suggest the proper spellings (camaraderie or comradery) upfront? Strange behavior, for a dictionary site.
Note that I didn't include the enormous, annoying popup I got when I did these searches. Broken all around.
Thanks to Nicolas Fleet for pointing out this brokenness.
Can you demonstrate that this is a widespread problem? I use Dictionary.com frequently (with my popup blocker turned on) and have never encountered a problem like this. Unless you can give me other examples, I'll chalk this up as one isolated mistake in their wordlist.
Of course it will. Dictionary.com puts the word you're searching for directly in the URL. The URL for "comraderie" is this:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=comraderie
When you click on the "comaraderie" result, you go here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=comaraderie
The search fails because there is no entry for that word. The search for possible matches will always return the same result.
The "brokenness" here is simply that there is a misspelled word in the suggestions list.
Not for nothing, but dictionary.com is one of the best, most useful sites on the net ... and on top of that, it's completely free. Get some pop-up banning software, give the site some feedback on the error you have found, and get with the spirit of grammatically-minded comaraderie fostered day-in-and-day-out save the annoyance of a wee bit of advertising and a little bug or two!!
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Amazon.com shopping cart | Main | Next: Sign for employee ideas
I've seen this with other words too. It seems to have an automated suggestion generator (Google seems to do the same thing with its search suggestions; I've had suggested searches that also turned up nothing), although it would seem to make sense to include something in the algorithim that would automatically check its own suggestions.
Posted by: Maurs at November 16, 2004 01:08 AM