

Google Search Now Includes Etymology - charlieirish
https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+onomatopoeia

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alecsmart1
It really worries me that whenever Google rolls out a feature within their
search results, it destroys a business. For example, earlier currency
conversion and dictionary word meanings required using third party sites. Now
it can be done directly via their search. I no longer visit the old sites. Now
with this, I will be less likely to visit etymonline.com. Quite similar to how
including IE by default in Windows lead to lawsuits of unfair
competition/monopoly. Is it wrong to believe something similar may happen with
Google search.

~~~
austinz
Looking forwards to the day Google includes electronic component datasheets in
its search results and puts all those stupid unusable SEO-gaming datasheet
repository websites out of business.

~~~
jmpe
Amen.

If you need an example, Google "TFK426". No, it's not a tuning fork, it's an
8-pin DIL.

Same goes for the brokers: "SAA1084P".

Those are just 2 examples I found last Friday. They're components on an old
PLC I need to fix and they're just laughing in my face. I suspect they're
opamps but I'll probably never know and I'll end up telling someone to just
buy a new system.

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Jongseong
Some initial remarks after playing around with this for a bit: Currently, this
seems to only include the etymology for English words. Proper nouns are not
included, except those also used as common nouns, like Newton. Nor are most
compound words made up of simpler words or affixes such as mainland, snowman,
simply, or even disuse. This is understandable because covering all these
cases will dramatically expand the number of words that have to be dealt with,
and this is probably the limitation of the original source used by Google for
the etymology information, which was probably an etymological dictionary with
the usual space constraints. But freed from such constraints, it should be
feasible in the future to add in the etymological information for such
compounds.

What I like is the tree structure of the presentation. This covers not only
compound words but weirder cases of combination of disparate etymological
sources—check out discombobulate or typhoon. But the tree structure is
misleading in cases like apple, where Dutch appel and German Apfel are
indicated as if they were parent forms instead of sister forms to the English
apple. The branching should occur between Germanic and the daughter languages
to make the relationship clearer. Also, note that this doesn't show the
Germanic form for apple—it looks like it doesn't do hypothetical forms,
restricting itself to attested forms.

A welcome feature would be being able to click through to different words at
each stage of the etymology, to be able to trace through to even earlier
stages or to see what other words are descended from the same roots.

~~~
DanBC
> Proper nouns are not included, except those also used as common nouns, like
> Newton

It has Pyrex, but just says it's an invented word.

Pyrex is invented, but comes from Pyro (Fire) + Rex (King), which makes the
use of it for heat proof glass easier to understand.

The new Google feature is really neat. I'm uneasy about these things being
built into Google rather than Google pointing people to other websites.

~~~
gibwell
Google building more and more stuff directly into search has been going on
since the early 2000s. Why are you uneasy now?

~~~
DanBC
I've always been uneasy about it.

Google providing me with definitions was troubling, but online dictionaries
are sub-optimal. Google giving me instant conversions was so handy that I
didn't care.

But etymologies are handled nicely by
[http://www.etymonline.com/](http://www.etymonline.com/) and it's sad to think
they're going to get a lot less traffic now.

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agumonkey
All in all, people really seeking etymology data won't use this, I don't think
a single website is a reference, so one needs to combine many sources.

Personally I blend etymonline.com,
[http://www.lexilogos.com/etymologie.htm](http://www.lexilogos.com/etymologie.htm),
[http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/](http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/),
www.wiktionary.org, and others to get a broader view.

This news will be little free publicity for them too, although I'd wish google
to include a little set of premade links into his in-search proxy box. That
would be a nice little touch, or maybe a commercial pain.

~~~
BrandonMarc
That would be nice, though I wonder if it would last if the even did it.

It used to be, if you searched for a map, Google would show a link to its own
map (with thumbnail) + links to other mapping services (mapquest, maporama,
etc). It used to be ...

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sz4kerto
The compiler cannot compile itself yet.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+etymology](https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+etymology)

:(

~~~
alberto_rico
Try again. That was fast.

~~~
sz4kerto
I mean it does not display that nice graph.

~~~
BrandonMarc
Yes, I was under the impression the graph was the feature. The textual
description of the etymology, I thought, was already often an included part of
the snippet.

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vermillion
It seems more and more clear with every new announcement, that Google has
adopted the "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy and it's taking it
farther than what we thought possible in the past.

These are worrisome news for every believer in choice and freedom. Google, a
former supporter of free software, is now determined to exert its power to get
rid of competitors and then lock us in. Our only option is to not give in to
momentary convenience, but to cultivate the habit of comparing alternatives
and choosing by ourselves instead.

~~~
cromwellian
Why should open, factual data, require Google to send users to third party
websites, thereby increasing the latency and number of clicks for all users?
The data for these almost surely comes from openly available word databases.

If I ask my computer or phone for the definition or history of the word 'Foo',
I don't want to be sent off to historyoffoo.com as the top link, I just want
it to give me the answer, followed perhaps by links to other stuff.

Do you think if you ask what time is it, Google should respond first and
foremost that you need to click and go to dateandtime.com to see the answer?

Google's mission is the organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful, not to organize only the world's websites
into 10 blue links.

The ultimate goal of Google is to built the Starship Enterprise's Computer.
Could you imagine Captain Picard's frustration if he said "How long to
Starbase Alpha at Warp 9" and the Computer replied "I can't give you the
direct answer, but please visit StarbaseMaps.com and it will be able to answer
your question."

This becomes all the more clearer if you imagine voice or mobile user, where
multi-step latency is huge and queries should be answered in the fewest steps
possible. Why it is evil for Google to do this, but not Apple+Siri I can't
fathom.

~~~
BrandonMarc
Does Apple profit from ads embedded in Siri?

~~~
cromwellian
Siri advertises 'Bing' on some results, I'm sure they get paid for that.

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personlurking
There's also the good ol' Etymonline
([http://www.etymonline.com/](http://www.etymonline.com/)) which I prefer over
the Google search.

~~~
DanielStraight
Which of course has a !bang on DuckDuckGo: !etym or !etymology

For a good comparison of how much more information Etymonline has, look up the
word "silly". Etymonline gives a much better sense of the almost unbelievable
shift in meaning over time.

~~~
personlurking
and, of course, "nice".

[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=nice&searchmode=none)

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aaronetz
As a native Hebrew speaker, I would love to see the reverse lookup. Enter a
biblical Hebrew word and see how it propagated to other languages. Two words
that I could come up with were leviathan and behemoth, but that was easy since
these sound almost the same in Hebrew.

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ankit84
Now I'll wait for a blog post from etymonline.com and wiktionary about how
their traffic went to zero.

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thom
You've always been able to search for bugs on Google, silly.

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shiftb
My wife has been using this for about a month to help teach Greek and Latin
roots to her 7th grade language arts students. It's a great tool for them to
use since they already know how to google.

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kmfrk
Has done for a while, but wasn't aware of using the "etymology" query; I used
to hit the drop-down on "define:" queries.

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xatnys
Neat. Wonder how they're generating those images. Using go + doing it as
they're queried maybe (similar to [http://blog.golang.org/from-zero-to-go-
launching-on-google](http://blog.golang.org/from-zero-to-go-launching-on-
google) )?

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notjustanymike
I googled war.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+onomatopoeia#q=ety...](https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+onomatopoeia#q=etymology+war)

War never changes.

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drmarianus
I'm a little sad it doesn't include the Proto-language root.

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Bharath1234
It seems they have pre-processed images of etymologies of most of the words
and just indexing it.

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mariuolo
Looks like a normal search to me...

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af3
startpage.com does not have this "feature".

