Sites try to deliver instant answers

How do you find a word’s meaning? Google and Microsoft’s Live both provide near-instant ways to get the answer.

Type “saturnine definition” in each search site’s box and you’ll find that answer.

More and more, search-site designers are hoping to pull in more visitors with quick tools.

Live, for instance, gives sports junkies the option of tracking down scores for a particular date. Type in “MLB 5/22”; you’ll see the full list of Major League Baseball scores for that date. The same option works with “College Football 10/7” or “NFL 10/15,” but doesn’t work at all yet for the NHL or NBA.

Such nifty short summaries are called instant answers, and Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are all building them in, say site managers.

Ask.com, one of the strong challengers competing for customers, has a synonym feature among its “smart answers.” Type in “irascible synonym” at Ask and you’ll get a list of similar words. Yahoo has the same feature, but Live and Google do not. Live does have a result under the “definition” choice that gives synonyms.

I tried the phrase “synonym synonym” at Ask and Yahoo, hoping to get another word for synonym. Neither site gave me an answer. In effect, they told me, “Go away, quit bugging us with trick questions.”