Reference.com was launched by InReference, Inc in February 1997. The site was later acquired by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. In 2005, Lexico announced that Reference.com would begin offering searches of
Wikipedia content. The popularity of
Dictionary.com had been greatly boosted by
Google's practice of offering a link at the top of their search results that goes to the Dictionary.com definition. This exclusive relationship was terminated without explanation to the public when the Google links were redirected to definitions at
Answers.com. (In December 2009, the Answers.com links were replaced with Google's own dictionary.) Google added a Dictionary.com definition link for certain search words in a non-exclusive relationship (along with links to definitions from a few other commercial reference websites). On 3 July 2008,
IAC acquired Lexico Publishing Group, LLC and its three properties: Thesaurus.com, Reference.com, and Dictionary.com. ==Sources==