The "gray lady" of journalism, the New York Times, is still accessorizing. In September, the paper ended its Times Select service, opening most of its content to anyone visiting its Web site (registration is free). Today, I stumbled across an innovation that I’d missed, despite being a daily reader of the paper.
Scroll to the bottom of recently published news stories and you see the following notice:
No need to switch to Google. Double-click, and up pops a window with information from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, The Columbia Encyclopedia, and WordNet (all of the references except WordNet are available free online at Bartleby.com, one of my bookmarked reference sites). The Reference Search feature also displays links to other articles published on the topic.
The search results (powered by Answers.com) aren’t as comprehensive as the arrays of links provided by the big search engines, but the feature sure is handy when you’re browsing a newspaper online. And the results include discrete ads. Maybe all the fretting about the state of the newspaper business is being overdone.
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