Friday, November 14, 2008

Haven't We Evolved Beyond Pop-up Ads?

I regularly use the Merriam-Webster online dictionary to look up words. It's a wonderful resource and I'm glad they made it available on line.

It's also incredibly annoying. I don't mind ads and I'm fine with plastering them all around the site, but for the love of Pete, why do they still use the pop-up ads? Argh! Every time I look up a word, I get another window bouncing onto my screen advertising this or that. Stop it! Go away! It makes looking up a word take twice as long.

If you've got a dictionary resource that doesn't do this, please let me know.

Human evolution. Apparently, it culminates in pop-up ads.

7 comments:

B-Daddy said...

I like dictionary.com. They have ads, but not annoying ones and give you multiple citations.

Kelly the little black dog said...

If you are only looking for spelling just try the word into the google search window.

Anonymous said...

Firefox plus NoScript plus Symantec 10. I've pretty much forgotten what online ads are :-)

(proxi)

Anonymous said...

I use www.dictionary.com for most things.

Also, if you're using the latest version of Explorer, you can turn on the pop-up blocker that will stop most of them.

Anonymous said...

http://dictionary.reference.com/

Very nice reference site. Good tools.

Word o' the Day today...

frowzy: frow-ZEE, adjective, dirty and untidy, slovenly, The Apostate

Anonymous said...

(This is Oromin, but I'm seeing if posting anonymously will work, since my posts have gotten eaten a lot lately.)

I'm seconding dictionary.com (it's the same as dictionary.reference.com).

I use Opera as my primary web browser. It automatically blocks pop-ups without me having to do or install anything at all.

For foreign-language dictionaries, Word Reference is very good, although for straight English definitons, dictionary.com is better.

P.S Capcha words have been trasid squid, and dense. Wow, real words!

Apian Apostle said...

To expand on the Google comment left by Kelly the Dog; type the word "define" before any word in a google search engine and it will return a few definitions, as well as recommendations for misspelled words at the top of the search. A cool google hack!