Answers.com wants to help
This is either for the truly lazy or the truly meticulous online readers out there.
Answers.com has partnered with nytimes.com to offer a feature enabling readers to look up any word for more information, both companies announced on Wednesday.
When readers alt-click (press the alt key while clicking their mouse) on any word on The New York Times online site, more information from Answers.com related to that word or topic opens in a pop-up window. (Yes, any word. Clicking on "the" brings you to a definition of that word.)
The feature offers information on more than 20 reference categories from Answers.com. While this seems like a great idea, especially for cruciverbalists, the feature had not quite been perfected when we tried it out.
On first look, quite a few hiccups in using the feature presented themselves. From within an article on NASA's latest space program challenges, alt-clicking the word "Atlantis" popped up an Answers.com entry on the mythical city.
The feature also seemed to be limited to single words. Trying to highlight and then alt-click the phrase "Mission Control" popped up an entry on "Mission," the city by the Rio Grande famous for its canning of citrus fruits ("especially grapefruit").
Since then, Answers.com says that it has made updates to remedy many of the problems. Content will still remain limited, however, because of its partnership agreement with The New York Times, according to Answers.com. For full content options it, of course, recommend its own 1-Click Answers tool for Web browsers.
"The less-than-perfect results you encountered are a consequence of the deal structured between The New York Times and Answers.com. The information for the reference library that the NYT created from our database includes only a subset of the nearly 4 million unique topics available on our site," said Gina Larson, a representative for Answers.com.
Hmm...still might be better to stick with a cut-and-paste search, or the "context clues" method you learned about in high school when reading the newspaper online.
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
