Google’s self-proclaimed goal is to organize the world’s information and, for the most part, it sticks to that. Once in a while though, it’s not satisfied with what it finds or the way the information is available elsewhere, so it just builds its own resource. And when you’ve got thousands of the world’s brightest engineers and designers working for you, it’s no surprise if you usually get it right. There are maybe thousands of dictionary tools and websites out there, yet Google must have felt that the space wasn’t catered to very well, so it released its own full-blown dictionary tool complete with definitions, synonyms and everything else you’d expect.
Google hasn’t made any official announcement and it looks like the tool is just being rolled out in its current form. Things get a little murky as google.com/dictionary has been around for almost a year now as a stand-alone service. It was initially part of the Google Translate set of tools. However, up till recently it served as an aggregator of results from the various dictionary sites around the web.
The site is pretty much what you’d expect from a Google dictionary. A query will return all the usual info found in any dictionary, no surprises here. It also returns definitions from the web, like it has done for a while now, and … (read more)
The web can be a wonderful resource for all kinds of information, but language is as much of a barrier as ever. It doesn’t really matter if you can access a piece of information if you can’t understand it. Translation tools have been around for years now, and Google is certainly interested in the space. Google Translate is a very useful tool, if not perfect, but, even after the recent update, using it still requires too many steps for most cases. Google knows this, so it took the obvious step, it integrated translation features into the search engine. 
