Latest / I Hate Talking / Dictionaries, Paywalls, and Search Engines

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Dictionaries, Paywalls, and Search Engines · I Hate Talking

• 0:30
  I Hate Talking: Welcome to episode 105 of I Hate Talking.
• 0:33
  I Hate Talking: Hi everyone.
• 0:34
  I Hate Talking: So today's word or phrase is a word, and that word is the word paywall.
• 0:40
  I Hate Talking: OK.
• 0:41
  I Hate Talking: So this has come up because the Oxford Language Dictionary is now behind a paywall of sorts.
• 0:52
  I Hate Talking: And this was previously used in all of our episodes or nearly all of our episodes, I guess it depends on if it was a particular phrase that we were doing and then if you've been listening to the last few episodes, you've known that we have not been able to use our favorite Oxford language dictionary because of said paywall.
• 1:12
  I Hate Talking: Right, so that we use that dictionary.
• 1:15
  I Hate Talking: For most of our episodes, and now we cannot.
• 1:18
  I Hate Talking: Right, so the Oxford Language Dictionary was actually a collection of dictionaries, mainly from the Oxford English Dictionary, which is and always was, I guess, required a subscription, though apparently you can use a library card.
• 1:38
  I Hate Talking: To get access to that, but we have not had a chance to test that yet if our library cards work or not.
• 1:46
  I Hate Talking: Oh, that's why is that why you asked me about my library card number.
• 1:49
  I Hate Talking: -- That -- is why I asked you about your library card number.
• 1:51
  I Hate Talking: -- That -- was weird.
• 1:52
  I Hate Talking: Um, I did look on Hoopla, where I get a lot of my audiobooks and Uh, e-books and they do not have it.
• 2:03
  I Hate Talking: There you go.
• 2:05
  I Hate Talking: So if you use a search engine to search Oxford Language Dictionary or Oxford English Dictionary and the word paywall, you can get to their fact sheet for free, which says that there's only one entry and it gives a little bit of frequency of usage and it gives very summary information about the etymology.
• 2:32
  I Hate Talking: Where it says that paywall is formed by combining pay and wall in English.
• 2:37
  I Hate Talking: And A little bit about the usage in terms of first being used in the early 2000s.
• 2:45
  I Hate Talking: Particularly 2004 and That apparently it was first published in Oxford English Dictionary in 2012.
• 2:57
  I Hate Talking: OK.
• 2:58
  I Hate Talking: And then if you use Google to ask for a definition of a word in the past, it would have incorporated some Oxford language dictionary results, but now it just gives AI overviews and it seems to source most of those from Merriam-Webster's.
• 3:18
  I Hate Talking: Interesting.
• 3:19
  I Hate Talking: So what is the purpose?
• 3:21
  I Hate Talking: Why do you think Oxford did this or the publishers?
• 3:26
  I Hate Talking: Well, there's perhaps.
• 3:29
  I Hate Talking: The fact that they want to make more money or didn't feel that they were getting equitable income for the usage, especially within Google perhaps, or maybe Google wants to just water down the meanings of words and Give it all over to AI.
• 3:49
  I Hate Talking: So I guess it depends if you go with the capitalism aspect or the conspiracy aspect.
• 3:56
  I Hate Talking: I probably go with capitalism, though I enjoy conspiracies, uh, because it is kind of challenging.
• 4:03
  I Hate Talking: If you have one, if all of your information and news and even vocabulary comes from one source, it may quiet every other source.
• 4:17
  I Hate Talking: They can really make words mean anything in a couple generations and.
• 4:23
  I Hate Talking: Really control the narratives.
• 4:25
  I Hate Talking: Yep, well, that was part of the theme of 1984.
• 4:29
  I Hate Talking: Probably need to go read that book again.
• 4:32
  I Hate Talking: It'd probably be Interesting to see how much has changed since my reading of that back probably in my high school days, maybe it was my last time reading that.
• 4:42
  I Hate Talking: Last time, did you read it multiple times?
• 4:46
  I Hate Talking: Yes.
• 4:47
  I Hate Talking: Oh wow, I've never read it.
• 4:49
  I Hate Talking: Well, there you go.
• 4:51
  I Hate Talking: Maybe we'll read that and do an episode on the book 1984.
• 4:55
  I Hate Talking: I think there's a quote about the meaning of words in that book.
• 5:00
  I Hate Talking: Now I'll have to search that.
• 5:02
  I Hate Talking: Will we use Google or will we use another alternative search engine?
• 5:06
  I Hate Talking: Is there even an alternative?
• 5:09
  I Hate Talking: There used to be like Yahoo.
• 5:10
  I Hate Talking: Does Yahoo even have a search engine any longer?
• 5:13
  I Hate Talking: I don't know.
• 5:15
  I Hate Talking: Yes, Jeeves, yeah, that was a good one.
• 5:17
  I Hate Talking: In Google's Chrome, you actually can choose.
• 5:23
  I Hate Talking: 5 different search engines.
• 5:26
  I Hate Talking: There's Google.
• 5:27
  I Hate Talking: There's Bing, which is Microsoft.
• 5:31
  I Hate Talking: Oh, I never liked that one.
• 5:32
  I Hate Talking: There's Yahoo.
• 5:33
  I Hate Talking: There's duck duck go.
• 5:35
  I Hate Talking: And Yandex.
• 5:37
  I Hate Talking: I've heard of Yandex.
• 5:39
  I Hate Talking: I've never used it.
• 5:39
  I Hate Talking: I think it's.
• 5:40
  I Hate Talking: It might be a European search engine, I think.
• 5:43
  I Hate Talking: Never heard of those last two, but yeah, so Yahoo's still around, I guess, huh?
• 5:48
  I Hate Talking: They're still hanging on.
• 5:50
  I Hate Talking: I'm not immediately finding any quotes, but maybe it was another dystopian novel that had something about how the meaning of words was used to subjugate the people.
• 6:03
  I Hate Talking: Well, I guess it's time to read the book again.
• 6:05
  I Hate Talking: Indeed, So something interesting that I found during the course of trying to research the history of the Oxford Language Dictionary and the use of the paywall, which we have not even actually defined yet.
• 6:17
  I Hate Talking: So I guess we'll have to do that, is that There's a Feature within Duck Duck Go, which I have now since changed my default search engine from Google to Duck Duck Go.
• 6:31
  I Hate Talking: It doesn't even sound like a real thing.
• 6:33
  I Hate Talking: You've never heard of Duck Duck Go?
• 6:36
  I Hate Talking: No, it sounds like a kid game.
• 6:38
  I Hate Talking: Well, it was previously purported to be less intrusive search engine, so basically privacy and they wouldn't keep your results and search history and things like that.
• 6:50
  I Hate Talking: So it's supposed to be more privacy friendly.
• 6:54
  I Hate Talking: Which I think perhaps is not the case anymore.
• 6:57
  I Hate Talking: There's people that say that Duck Duck Go does record all that information now and just like every other search engine.
• 7:04
  I Hate Talking: So maybe not so much.
• 7:06
  I Hate Talking: Useful from the privacy perspective, but they do have a feature where it has a no AI feature.
• 7:13
  I Hate Talking: OK, so.
• 7:16
  I Hate Talking: You can click that and they won't like how usually now Google gives you your first thing is uh AI generated -- or you just don't get any AI -- period.
• 7:28
  I Hate Talking: The search results are a little bit different, I think, from my brief testing of it.
• 7:32
  I Hate Talking: So you can go to no AI.duckduckgo.com and it brings you to the page that says no AI with a little cute picture of a duck icon.
• 7:43
  I Hate Talking: And it says you search privately without AI.
• 7:46
  I Hate Talking: It has AI assisted answers turned off, and it also removes AI generated images.
• 7:53
  I Hate Talking: And when I was briefly testing it and using it to search for different things like camping or some of the history on dictionaries.
• 8:04
  I Hate Talking: It It was quite refreshing of an experience.
• 8:08
  I Hate Talking: It was almost like going back to a decade ago and using search engines.
• 8:13
  I Hate Talking: How so?
• 8:15
  I Hate Talking: Like, what was refreshing about it?
• 8:17
  I Hate Talking: We got like results of websites that may contain the answers that you need instead of getting this perfectly curated answer that may or may not be correct.
• 8:31
  I Hate Talking: I think most times the AI generated answers are pretty close, but this was like the old days where you actually had to do a little bit of digging to find the answers that you wanted.
• 8:45
  I Hate Talking: So it was refreshing, -- like nostalgic -- for you.
• 8:47
  I Hate Talking: It was nostalgic.
• 8:48
  I Hate Talking: Look at all the different websites and then go to the website that you wanted to see and then read the text within the website because we have had that instance where We were trying to get New York boat schedules and things like that, and AI was completely wrong because it was reading a website that was outdated.
• 9:04
  I Hate Talking: And if you had visited that website, you would see that it like either no longer exists or no longer was relevant and would have not made that mistake.
• 9:13
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, that's I am, one of our kids is doing their very first research project.
• 9:18
  I Hate Talking: And that's what they're doing in school.
• 9:20
  I Hate Talking: They're big in the school activity.
• 9:23
  I Hate Talking: And so I'm teaching him how to do a research project, and, you know, you need a certain amount of books and magazines and Websites.
• 9:35
  I Hate Talking: And I cannot convince him.
• 9:38
  I Hate Talking: That we need to go to the library and get books.
• 9:42
  I Hate Talking: He wanted to cite Wildrats, which is a good show.
• 9:49
  I Hate Talking: Um, he's doing it on Porky Pines, and they have an episode.
• 9:53
  I Hate Talking: And then he found so much information online about porcupines.
• 9:58
  I Hate Talking: He's like, I don't need a book.
• 10:00
  I Hate Talking: But you do because it's the project and I do agree.
• 10:05
  I Hate Talking: He has a lot of information on porcupines, websites, we just googled porcupines, a ton of stuff pops up, right?
• 10:12
  I Hate Talking: Like National Geographics and all those.
• 10:14
  I Hate Talking: But they show something about having going to the library and looking up the actual books.
• 10:22
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, those aren't gonna change it.
• 10:25
  I Hate Talking: I mean, and porcupines probably don't change, right?
• 10:27
  I Hate Talking: That's not probably a hot button topic that The media changes.
• 10:33
  I Hate Talking: But it's harder to change something that's written down in a book and binded.
• 10:38
  I Hate Talking: And something that's online.
• 10:40
  I Hate Talking: -- That's -- true.
• 10:41
  I Hate Talking: So if I use noAI.go.com and search to find paywall, it does give a little bit of summary information from the website, so it does give a snippet of a definition.
• 10:57
  I Hate Talking: Provided by Wordnick.com, so word NIK.com, which primarily cites the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition.
• 11:10
  I Hate Talking: OK, how do you feel about that one, when you're ranking them?
• 11:14
  I Hate Talking: So, I'm not converted 100%.
• 11:19
  I Hate Talking: I'm still probably going to try to see if our library cards work with the Oxford Language Dictionaries's access.
• 11:26
  I Hate Talking: But this could be a good replacement.
• 11:29
  I Hate Talking: Oh, OK.
• 11:30
  I Hate Talking: So, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition.
• 11:36
  I Hate Talking: Defines paywall as a noun.
• 11:39
  I Hate Talking: A feature of a website that denies access to certain content to users who have not paid to view it, or a feature of a website, application, or service that only allows access to certain pages, data, or features.
• 11:53
  I Hate Talking: To paid up subscribers.
• 11:55
  I Hate Talking: OK, yeah, I mean, that sounds accurate.
• 11:58
  I Hate Talking: And then it does have etymology as well.
• 12:02
  I Hate Talking: So that is also a feature of the Oxford language dictionaries that I always enjoyed and The American Heritage Dictionary does have etymologies.
• 12:15
  I Hate Talking: I don't know if there's any very deep etymology in the word paywall because it is basically.
• 12:24
  I Hate Talking: A plus wall and part of the etymology was from related.
• 12:31
  I Hate Talking: Software terms of a firewall, so firewall being that thing to prevent.
• 12:37
  I Hate Talking: Unauthorized access into various softwares or applications or websites.
• 12:43
  I Hate Talking: So this is another type of wall, and it is a paywall because you have to pay to go past it.
• 12:49
  I Hate Talking: So would this only have been in the last couple decades then since the internet?
• 12:55
  I Hate Talking: It was not a term used prior to that?
• 12:58
  I Hate Talking: Correct.
• 13:00
  I Hate Talking: So it seems like this was first used maybe in some articles online in 2004, and then there's various dictionaries that added it to their dictionary.
• 13:13
  I Hate Talking: Sometime between 2010 and 2012 is when it seems to be.
• 13:18
  I Hate Talking: Categorically added into dictionary definitions.
• 13:22
  I Hate Talking: -- Oh -- wow, that's pretty soon.
• 13:24
  I Hate Talking: And then The American Heritage Dictionary also has stats.
• 13:30
  I Hate Talking: So you can go if you have an American Heritage dictionary or a Wordnick.com.
• 13:37
  I Hate Talking: Account you can favorite words.
• 13:41
  I Hate Talking: You can comment on words.
• 13:44
  I Hate Talking: And you can also learn that Paywall has a Scrabble score of 15.
• 13:50
  I Hate Talking: OK, so lots of interesting information.
• 13:54
  I Hate Talking: So there you go.
• 13:56
  I Hate Talking: So yeah, American Heritage Dictionary.
• 13:59
  I Hate Talking: Has a one up on Oxford language dictionaries cause it gives you the Scrabble score.
• 14:05
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, and you can like, you said like words or upvote words.
• 14:12
  I Hate Talking: What is it?
• 14:13
  I Hate Talking: So on here, there's a button that says love, so you can love the word.
• 14:19
  I Hate Talking: OK.
• 14:21
  I Hate Talking: How many people have loved Paywall?
• 14:24
  I Hate Talking: Nobody.
• 14:25
  I Hate Talking: You could be the very first.
• 14:26
  I Hate Talking: You can make your account on Wordnick.com or American Heritage Dictionary.com, and you can love Paywall, and you can be, the first.
• 14:35
  I Hate Talking: That's true.
• 14:36
  I Hate Talking: We can create an account and then we could go love every word that we've ever done.
• 14:39
  I Hate Talking: Oh, that will take a long while, but yeah, you can do that.
• 14:44
  I Hate Talking: So there you go.
• 14:47
  I Hate Talking: I suppose we will still look into Oxford Language Dictionary, see if we can use our library card, or perhaps you, our listener have tried that and either have paid for an account or have attempted to use your library card.
• 15:01
  I Hate Talking: You can always let us know your experience in a comment or send us a text or an email or whatever the case may be, but It sounds like I hate talking, maybe converting to the American Heritage Dictionary.
• 15:14
  I Hate Talking: There you go.
• 15:15
  I Hate Talking: What are your opinions on paywalls?
• 15:18
  I Hate Talking: Pro con.
• 15:21
  I Hate Talking: Pro at Contra on paywalls.
• 15:24
  I Hate Talking: I mean, I certainly am aligned that people need to get paid for the work that they do.
• 15:29
  I Hate Talking: So if that's the method in which they employ in order to Get a paycheck, quote unquote, for the work that they're doing.
• 15:39
  I Hate Talking: I can understand that, but I also am a proponent of the free exchange of information, especially if it's relevant to perhaps society or science or health, that those type of things should be more in the vein of free exchange of ideas.
• 15:58
  I Hate Talking: So like, if there's certain Medical studies or things like that that are maybe relevant to some sort of medical experience that you're encountering that would be nice if those things were free.
• 16:11
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, I agree.
• 16:14
  I Hate Talking: I think as a whole, I don't have a problem with paywalls or paying for information.
• 16:20
  I Hate Talking: Um, I do think that if it's like news or medical, And That sort of thing.
• 16:29
  I Hate Talking: I think that should be free for us all to know, even like the weather, right?
• 16:34
  I Hate Talking: You pay for more advanced weather alerts than I have on my phone.
• 16:39
  I Hate Talking: And I don't really like that you have to pay to get better alerts, cause that seems like a safety issue.
• 16:47
  I Hate Talking: So those I think, I don't like paywalls for that kind of stuff.
• 16:51
  I Hate Talking: I think if it's a safety issue, health or weather or anything like that, that should be uh free and common knowledge.
• 17:00
  I Hate Talking: I have no problem though with creators charging.
• 17:05
  I Hate Talking: For their stuff, like occasionally there'll be a content creator and I'll enjoy.
• 17:11
  I Hate Talking: They'll do like some free stuff on maybe Spotify, and then they'll have like a Patreon account.
• 17:17
  I Hate Talking: And I don't mind paying for their Patreons or paying for a while and then stopping again.
• 17:23
  I Hate Talking: Because their time is worth something, and I value their information they're sharing.
• 17:29
  I Hate Talking: And the same thing, another website I use a lot, I pay for is Teachers Pay Teachers.
• 17:36
  I Hate Talking: And usually it'll be like, you know, a teacher or someone makes some.
• 17:41
  I Hate Talking: I bought one the other day we're doing in school, one of our kids is doing the mouse in the motorcycle, reading the book.
• 17:47
  I Hate Talking: And so I paid for some curriculum for that, so that they have activities to do revolving around that book.
• 17:56
  I Hate Talking: And again, it was a couple dollars and I valued their time.
• 18:00
  I Hate Talking: Putting all those questions, discussion questions together and activities together versus me coming up with it myself.
• 18:07
  I Hate Talking: So I think they deserve that couple dollars.
• 18:11
  I Hate Talking: That's true.
• 18:13
  I Hate Talking: So, and I also don't feel too bad if it's a particular news source or something that is useful information that I can align spending some money to support that particular organization.
• 18:30
  I Hate Talking: But I suppose if you had to have accounts for all the different news organizations, it would be quite A significant sum to subscribe to everything.
• 18:40
  I Hate Talking: And then there is a trick that I guess if you need a particular paper or Medical study that oftentimes the author or group of authors will list their email and most times if you really want that, you can email them and say, may I have a copy of your study or paper and most times they will email it to you.
• 19:07
  I Hate Talking: Again, an internet tip, I've never actually attempted this, but I've read that that is possible if you are.
• 19:14
  I Hate Talking: Very set on getting access to content like that and don't want to pay for it.
• 19:20
  I Hate Talking: Oh, that's interesting.
• 19:21
  I Hate Talking: I didn't know that.
• 19:22
  I Hate Talking: Well, it may or may not work, but that's what the internet says.
• 19:27
  I Hate Talking: Well, does Duck Duck Go say that?
• 19:31
  I Hate Talking: I don't know.
• 19:33
  I Hate Talking: I mean, there is that famous quote from Abraham Lincoln that says, you can't believe everything you read online.
• 19:38
  I Hate Talking: Right.
• 19:39
  I Hate Talking: There is an AI video of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
• 19:44
  I Hate Talking: Oh yeah, it was actually, it looked good.
• 19:48
  I Hate Talking: It looks sort of like what the period would look like if they had cameras like that back then.
• 19:55
  I Hate Talking: Did they not have cameras at all back then?
• 19:58
  I Hate Talking: Well, I don't think they had videotography.
• 20:01
  I Hate Talking: But they had more than just like painters, right?
• 20:06
  I Hate Talking: Yes.
• 20:07
  I Hate Talking: Now, now I'm like trying to do the math in my head, like, yeah, right.
• 20:13
  I Hate Talking: Yes.
• 20:15
  I Hate Talking: According to Duck Duck Go's AI search assistant, the first photograph was taken in 1826.
• 20:21
  I Hate Talking: Wait, you just said they didn't have AI.
• 20:23
  I Hate Talking: They have AI, but you can turn it off.
• 20:26
  I Hate Talking: OK, so you have the two different options.
• 20:28
  I Hate Talking: So you can use their standard search, which does have their version of search assist, which is AI.
• 20:34
  I Hate Talking: Or you can go to no AI.
• 20:36
  I Hate Talking: Dot duck go.com and then it turns it off.
• 20:40
  I Hate Talking: OK, so read that to me again and then right before you do though, I'm gonna look at mine and see what my preferred search engine tells me.
• 20:50
  I Hate Talking: Yep, I searched for when the first camera was invented or when the first picture was taken.
• 20:55
  I Hate Talking: OK, what did you say?
• 20:57
  I Hate Talking: The first photograph was taken in 1826.
• 21:01
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, that's probably what I have.
• 21:04
  I Hate Talking: I prefer Gemini.
• 21:06
  I Hate Talking: It's where I actually get a lot of my information now and um as we're living in a new home, I'll even take pictures of rooms and be like, how should I decorate this wall?
• 21:18
  I Hate Talking: And it will create a nice image and reasoning for.
• 21:22
  I Hate Talking: Why I should put a picture frame there or something.
• 21:26
  I Hate Talking: So yes, they have a huge list and they break it down, but 9.
• 21:32
  I Hate Talking: 1826 was the date they have for the first camera, as we think about it.
• 21:38
  I Hate Talking: Yes, one can search for video camera, make sure.
• 21:43
  I Hate Talking: That The video camera was not invented during the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
• 21:49
  I Hate Talking: Well, Gemini, again, says the first moving, moving picture camera was 1888.
• 21:58
  I Hate Talking: That is what mine has as well, 1888, The Roundhay Garden Scene by Louis La Prince.
• 22:06
  I Hate Talking: And he and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
• 22:12
  I Hate Talking: So cameras were invented but not video cameras.
• 22:17
  I Hate Talking: Yes, OK.
• 22:19
  I Hate Talking: It's not like I believed what you were saying that the camera video surfaced of it.
• 22:26
  I Hate Talking: I was just making sure.
• 22:27
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, Abraham Lincoln said it.
• 22:29
  I Hate Talking: Don't believe everything you read online.
• 22:31
  I Hate Talking: So, I guess we have some to do still.
• 22:36
  I Hate Talking: We still need to test our library card for Oxford Language Dictionary.
• 22:41
  I Hate Talking: I have to do some more research on the American Heritage Dictionary, make sure that is a suitable source, perhaps if we use that moving forward.
• 22:49
  I Hate Talking: And the good thing is you are a listener, do not have to pay anything.
• 22:54
  I Hate Talking: There is no paywall for our podcast.
• 22:56
  I Hate Talking: No.
• 22:57
  I Hate Talking: So you can always listen to this wherever you get your podcast and like, share, subscribe, and you can share it with other people, and they also will not need to Encounter any paywall to listen to this episode or any of our previous episodes, nor at this time planned any future episodes.
• 23:18
  I Hate Talking: There are people that do that, like that's sort of the way that podcasts go.
• 23:23
  I Hate Talking: They start out free and then they have subscriber episodes that are.
• 23:28
  I Hate Talking: Only available, right?
• 23:31
  I Hate Talking: And then they make you pay for their extra content.
• 23:34
  I Hate Talking: That's true.
• 23:36
  I Hate Talking: We do have a listener support link, though, I don't think we've ever mentioned that, we just silently added it in the background.
• 23:43
  I Hate Talking: But that is there.
• 23:45
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, I mean, that's great, but yeah, more than that, sharing and liking and commenting.
• 23:50
  I Hate Talking: Helps us in our.
• 23:53
  I Hate Talking: Our hobby done?
• 23:55
  I Hate Talking: Yeah.
• 23:56
  I Hate Talking: And then likewise, you can always let us know if you have a particular favorite search engine or a favorite dictionary.
• 24:05
  I Hate Talking: Yeah, let us know in the comments.
• 24:07
  I Hate Talking: So from your friends at I Hate Talking, until next time, remember, it is only through talking that we begin the journey to understanding.