Abstract
Given the growing number of contents available via the Internet, we usually encounter unknown words. However, it is often difficult to obtain descriptions for new words and technical terms in existing dictionaries and encyclopedias. The World Wide Web, which contains an enormous volume of up-to-date information, is a promising source to obtain new term descriptions. However, existing Web search engines often retrieve a number of extraneous pages and retrieved information is not organized as in hand-crafted encyclopedias. This paper describes a new searching site in which users can utilize the Web as an encyclopedia. Our site automatically compiles and updates an encyclopedia using Web pages, and has a number of useful retrieval functions.
