When we design our dictionaries, a key question in our mind is the User Journey, i.e. What's the quickest way to get a user to the definition they want?
When publishers began to make electronic dictionaries, people thought it would solve all the difficult issues - we could have a searchable index so that someone searching for "society" would find not only "society" but also "building society". A user searching for an irregular inflection like "got" can be linked to "get" and so get to "get" much faster than they would have got there from "got" in a printed book.
But some of the problems we had with printed dictionaries have remained with us.
How to present multiple possible definitions, but still give them the best chance of finding the right one.
The API offers two methods for finding an entry: search and searchFirst.
Search
The more traditional search method returns a list of results, which are effectively links. Have a look at a search for society on CDO. NB that some searches can have a lot of results.
This has the advantage of forcing the user to think about polysemy (= when a word has more than one meaning).
However, when the top result is the one the user wants (and we put a lot of work into this, so we hope it often is!), then this list just slows them down.
Therefore, we suggest the following shortcut in your application: If there is only one entry, e.g. for "moccasin", go straight to that entry. Ideally, if there are two results pointing to the same entry id (e.g. a search for "slingback"), there is also no point in adding a results list stage. This means that where there is genuinely no advantage to the extra search page, we don't have it.
And don't forget a link to let the user go back to the search results.
Feeling Lucky?
Of course, we could just go straight to the top matching entry. This is the approach taken by Google's "I'm feeling Lucky" button, and the searchFirst method is the way to do this in a single API call.
The upside is, of course, that the user gets to the entry quicker and with fewer clicks (or other interactions).
The downside is that sometimes the sense will not be the sense the user was looking for: we gave them "society" not "building society", or "boot (noun)" not "boot (verb)". If it is wrong, the user is stuck. Therefore our second recommendation is: If you use searchFirst, you need to give the user the search results at the same time.
This is how we do it on CDO: As well as the entry, we provide a "More results" panel. Note that we don't show them all the results, as we don't want to take up the whole page. Instead, if you want all the results, you click on the "See all results" button at the bottom of the list.
