Ask Jeeves Has Some New Language Tools

Ask Jeeves has announced in their blog that their search engine has some new language tool offerings.

First up, page translation. Do a search for a non-English word -- strassen works well. You'll see that you get next to most of the results a link to translate the page. This brought two questions to mind. First, "Why do translation tools always seem to get short shrift in search engines?" Ask Jeeves had part of the answer in their blog entry: "Why haven't we had it in the past? Because we didn't have many foreign-language pages in our index." Fair enough. Second question: "Why not more?" There are automatic page translations here, but why not a big translation page ala Google, or am I missing it?

(Speaking of search engines all mashed together, does anyone else think it's cute that Ask Jeeves is using Yahoo-owned Flickr to show screens shots on their blog?)

Anyway, back to the tools. Ask Jeeves has a search shortcut for showing dictionary definitions -- the word define followed by the word you want defined: define prosaic.At the top of the search results you'll get a definition and a direct link to an audio file of a pronunciation! If you click on "Definitions of 'prosaic'", you'll be taken to a detail page that gives an extended definition and synonyms. Another tab takes you to a thesaurus for that definition.

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