Search engines are about to drive dictionary sites out of business

Dictionary Web sites, as you may have surmised, are akin to the oxpeckers. The only way they can sustain themselves is by borrowing resources from far larger game—search engines, in this case. All sorts of traffic finds its way to an online dictionary through a search engine, which means that all sorts of advertising revenue depends on those clicks coming through. On the Internet, pageviews equal revenue, especially when you pack dozens of ads on a page, as the dictionary sites do. Without search engines feeding the dictionaries traffic, the reference sites probably couldn't survive. But search engines are smarter than giraffes. They've always had the ability to evolve and start providing definitions on their own. Thus, the dictionary sites have always been in a precarious spot; their hosts could grow the equivalent of a backscratcher at any moment and put the oxpecker out of a job. And now it finally appears that search engines have had enough. Without warning, the evolution has already begun; dictionary sites are more endangered than ever. But if search engines borrow too much content and leech too many page views they'll send the dictionary sites out of business. And then where will they get their definitions?