Google Definitions - any ideas on the algo?

[jenagain]

I'm having a lot of fun with the Define: command in Google. For example, if I type:

define:HMI

into the search box, I get a page full of definitions taken from the glossaries of various web sites. The results come from informational sites as well as commercial ones. I don't think these sites have partnerships with Google, and I can see there would be some benefits for an industry-specific site to have a good presence in these results.

Does anyone have any insight on how Google determines these results?

[strategicrankings]

Through time i've noticed that some of my clients sites where a glossary was set up very often receive traffic from Google's definition queries.

To experiment further, i proposed other potential clients to have a glossary set up for their website whatever their industry (insurance,travel,shipping etc) maybe and this has proved to be very effective.

I, myself afterwards set up a glossary on my own website and yes, i get a lot of traffic from SEO terms definition from Google.

So i would recommend to have a well crafted glossary section on your site, with a first page having links to other alphabetical sections. Craft your description and title tags conveniently and see how you can enjoy a lot of traffic for your industry related terms.

[rustybrick]

I set up a contextually sensitive glossary a long long time ago (before Google has these definitions), with the purpose of helping my readers understand technical terms we used throughout the site, time and time again.

Example:
On my Web technologies page (http://www.rustybrick.com/company_technologies.php), you will see a lot of dotted underlined words, when you mouse over, it has a ? symbol and then uses a title attribute to give you a teaser of the definition. If you click on it, it takes you directly to the Web definitions (http://www.rustybrick.com/definitions.php) page, anchored to that term.

For example do a search in Google on What is XML (http://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+xml) and presto you will see my result.

How it works exactly, I am not sure, but it does. and I don't have an ABC listing on my definitions page.

[Marketing Guy]

Noticed some common elements are "definition" and "glossary", which stands to reason really. Possibly sites are identified through some "authority" status (potentially IBLs?).

MG

[strategicrankings]

I found the alphabetical listing interesting in a usability point of view, in order to help users quickly find the definition exactly in the corresponding alphabetical page, for example looking for searchWhat is meta search? (http://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+meta+search) brings you to the "M" section of the glossary at once.
There more definitions you have, i think that dividing the glossary into alphabetical section helps the user quite a bit.