How does Google build the results to the define:keyword command?

bouncybunny - It's possible to observe the patterns if you do some searches on Google and look at them. I chanced to try one test search that turned out to be immediately revealing... a search for...

define:keywords

One of the pages returned, which was a TBPR5 article in a scientific journal, had this line (which I'm examplifying) in about the fourth paragraph of the page:

Keywords: cosmic structures, gravitation, gravitational effects, galaxies, relativity

Rather than seeing this keyword list as visible keywords for the article, Google's "define" operator algo took this list to be a definition of "keywords"... most probably because the word keywords was followed by a colon and words separated by commas in a dictionary-like form. This was the only instance of the term "keywords" on the page.

The page was in a directory called "/journal/" ...which might also have had an effect. Many of the other "keywords" definitions come from pages or directories named "glossary," "papers," "library," etc. So, there's a set of bookish references that Google might look for as well.

I also did the following search on Google...

site:webmasterworld.com google definitions

Among many others, the following threads, which looked promising, produced observations similar to what I'm noting above.

Getting listed as a Google Definition
How to get your site listed as a Google definition
[webmasterworld.com...]

I didn't set out to create a page for that feature, but a page on my site that has a pretty comprehensive glossary of publishing terms gets pulled into it for relevant words.... I suspect you have to give the page a meaningful name, and set up your entries as in a dictionary.

Google Definitions
Getting my listings in Google Definitions
[webmasterworld.com...]

I remember that Google Definitions were also called Google Glossary... might still be.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:08 am (utc) on June 9, 2007]