I heard the use of the word tacit today. I hadn’t heard it in a while, and wanted to check what it meant by checking up on the definition at Dictionary.com. There it was, “understood without being openly expressed; implied”. Then in the sidebar, this Ask.com graphic caught my eye:

One of the links there is “How do you use Tacit in a sentence?”. I was curious, so I clicked through, landing on an Ask.com page with the same question used as the search term. Here’s what I was immediately faced with:

Narrow? What does that mean? Narrow down the search result? Clearly this is Ask.com’s answer to Google’s did you mean feature, but in attempt to differentiate the functionality they’ve ripped off from a competitor, they completely obfuscated the meaning.

It gets better. They’ve replaced Tacit with auspicious, which is clearly not the same meaning as tacit. What’s the logic here? How am I narrowing down my question of asking how to use one word in a sentence, by asking how another completely different word is used?

What can be learned from this? If you can’t get smart algorithms to suggest a better search result, don’t suggest anything at all. Google uses their Did you mean function primarily to suggest spelling corrections, and they do it really well. Ask.com has succeeded in pulling me away from my Dictionary.com search result, but they’ve completely lost me in their attempt to make the search results more relevant.