• by Shankar Gupta , October 24, 2006

CBSNews.com has started supplementing its news stories with information from reference site Answers.com, under a new deal between the companies.

With the deal, users can seek further information about terms within CBS.com news articles by holding down the "alt" key while clicking on the terms they wish to research. A separate pop-up window then opens, containing Answers.com definitions and explanations of the terms clicked on. The technology looks at surrounding words for context when selecting the entry to display. Users can then click through to the Answers.com site for more information.

Mike Sims, director of news and operations for CBSNews.com, said the feature grew out of viewer requests made to Katie Couric, who recently replaced Dan Rather as the "CBS Evening News" anchor.

"When Katie Couric started, she took a cross-country tour and met with a lot of viewers, and she said one of the things that people said over and over is that they wanted more background information, more information behind the stories," Sims said. "We immediately thought of Answers.com."

In September, Answers.com finalized a similar deal with The New York Times.

For the ad-supported Answers.com, the aim of these deals is to build traffic. The bottom of the Answers.com pop-up window invites users to click through to the site for more information.