Forum:Wikia and Google define:

You all know Google and perhaps many of you also know and use the Google "define:" feature. I use it every day while writing Wikia articles. You enter e.g. define:otaku and you'll get definitions for the term "otaku" which Google found on the Web. Among the results displayed are Wikipedia articles and glossaries from thousands of websites.

Unfortunately no Wikia articles are returned by this particular Google function although many Wikia wikis have good encyclopedic articles, especially on lemmas that have no Wikipedia article and no match elsewhere in the Web. For example, it would be nice if define:Boober Fraggle returned the article Boober Fraggle from Muppet Wiki, rather than saying "No definitions were found for Boober Fraggle."

Could someone speak to Google's tech staff on how we could get Google to index Wikia articles in their define: feature? I don't know what Wikipedia did to get indexed, but whatever it was, we should do the same thing. It would allow people to find our articles much better and draw attention and more people to Wikia.

I already raised this topic in the Help Desk in September 2006, but it got no attention at all, so I'm raising the issue again here at the Watercooler. --Spankart 15:33, 13 January 2007 (UTC)


 * hmmm... maybe I'll try later...  they are kind f hard to get in touch with though...  ~


 * Has anyone picked up this issue yet? I think it is really important. It will direct people who search for encyclopedic articles on topics not covered by Wikipedia to our Wikia. The normal Google index may be sufficient for general websites - but encyclopedic content (which defines and explains a term) should be indexed in Google define. It is so frustrating to always get these "No definitions were found" results despite the fact we have fine articles - often, the best that exist on the Web - on exactly that search term. Thousands of glossaries are indexed, Wikipedia is indexed, so why can't we? --Spankart 10:25, 20 April 2007 (UTC)