What's the best method for dictionary lookups?

First, I love Mojeek. It’s my default search engine on all my browsers (desktop, Android).

I’ve always used search engines as a quick dictionary, and I’m wondering what’s the best way to look up the definition of (mostly English) words?

Is it:

  • define [word]
  • [word] dictionary
  • [word] meaning

… or some other keyword that either brings up the definition like Google does, or brings the most dictionary websites to the top of the serps?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

2 Likes

Thanks @jasoncomely for your kind and encouraging words.

This is a great question and a priority for Mojeek.

We have a couple ways we are looking to tackle this, and if you don’t mind I’ll hold over responding about those until next week. It will be easier to understand and explain then.

In the meanwhile, here are hacks I personally use with Mojeek search to tackle word challenges. Others will have different, and quite probably better, hacks.

On related matters I also use things like

I’ll be trying yours too :smiley::

Thank you and let’s see if anyone else has suggestions.

1 Like

Continuing the discussion from Mojeek Focus: Introduction and How to set-up:

You might notice that there are a limited number of results while using the Dictionary template in Mojeek Focus. Here, Mojeek tries to show you the top result from each domain. And, by default, the results are limited to one result per website. This is due to Site Clustering.

If you want to see more results from a particular source, you will have to click the link under one of the initial results.

Showing More Results from One Website

For example, if I want more results from Merriam-Webster then I can click the link beneath that result.

Below we see additional results.

Disable Site Clustering for This Search

There is also an option to unbundle a particular query. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “without site clustering” link. That will show multiple results from each domain.

Showing the link to "Try again without site clustering" at the bottom of the results page.

Site Clustering Preference

Or you can permanently disable clustering. But that applies to all searches and not just Focus.

Visit the Mojeek Settings page, click on the “Search Results” tab, change the “Results per domain” preference to a different value, and click the “Save Settings” button. The next search will be affected by the new settings.

Note that a fixed number will group results by domain. And the “unlimited” setting will rank each result invidually regardless of the domain.


Hopefully, this explains why results are limited while using Mojeek Focus. And I’ve offered some advice if you want to see more results.

Mike

Many thanks for thus useful explaination @mike

But @mike how did you get this results, shown in first image?

I can only get the “See more results from …” when I use parameter si=2 I get this:


but with si=1 or si not specified I get this:

I’m not sure.

To test now, I just opened up a new private window and got the results below. There I can “see more” without any settings or cookies.


In my original screen capture, I clearly have some customizations like zero-length snippets. And I have not activated the new search algorithm there.

Mike

Vivaldi’s Guest Mode is also showing more.