Britannica.com
Review
by Greg R. Notess
Britannica.com, formerly known as eBLAST (Encyclopędia Britannica Links and Search Tool) and eBIG (Encyclopędia Britannica's Internet Guide), is a directory with a more scholarly focus than the other directories, featuring academic resources. As of November 1999, the site has made a major transformation, growing well beyond just a Web directory. It now includes the complete content of of the Encyclopędia Britannica. The Web directory results are now called the Web's Best Sites. Britannica also features access to full-text articles from about 70 periodicals and links to books available for purchase from Barnes & Noble. Use the table of contents on the left to navigate this review.
Databases:
Britannica.com now includes four major databases:
* The full text of the Encyclopędia Britannica
* The Web directory portion, called the Web's Best Sites
* Full-text magazine articles from about 70 periodicals that come from Ebsco
* Links to related books available for purchase from Barnes & Noble.
Strengths:
* Scholarly, academic focus
* Integration of periodical articles and Encyclopędia Britannica
Weaknesses:
* Web directory is no longer separately searchable
* Web directory is relatively small
Default Operation: Multiple search terms are processed as an OR operation by default.
Boolean Searching:: Full Boolean searching is supported for AND, OR, and NOT. Operators must be in upper case. Scripted Boolean searches are available from the advanced search. The default operator is currently an OR. The + and - operators can be used instead of AND or OR.
Proximity Searching: ADJ is available and specifies that the two terms must within 15 characters of each other in the specified order. The ADJ operators must be in upper case. Double quotes can be used, but they force an ADJ operation rather than a true phrase search. The "exact phrase" option in the advanced search is also the ADJ operator and not a true phrase search.
Truncation: According to its help file, Britannica supports truncation with the asterisk * symbol. However, it does not work in practice, as of Nov. 14, 1999. Search terms do still are automatically searched as a stemmed search. In other words, the results include all forms of the term including plural, singular, and tense.
Case Sensitivity: Britannica has case sensitive searching. Lower case search terms will retrieve any case or mixture of cases. For an exact case match, use at least on upper case letter in a search term.
Field Searching: In the advanced search, a title search is available.
Stop Words: Britannica does have stop words and even publishes its stop word list.
Sorting: The sites appear to be sorted by relevance.
Display:
The first few hits from each of the four component databases are shown on the results screen with those from the Encyclopędia Britannica first. To move beyond the Britannica.com four databases, there is a link on the results page to search the Web:
Clicking this link provides Inktomi search results, filtered by N2H2, and served up by Searchopolis.
Selection Criteria: Entries are all selected Britannica editors and are judged based on the following criteria:
- depth, accuracy, completeness, and utility of information
- quality and effectiveness of presentation
- credentials and authority of the author or publisher
- elegance of design and ease of navigation
- frequency of revision
- quality of graphics or multimedia
Size of of Britannica : According to the company, as of Nov. 1999, Britannica had over 125,000 entries.
Ratings:Britannica has six levels: Best of the Web, Superior, Excellent, Recommended, Noteworthy, and Unrated. These are designated with stars. The ratings are based on the above selection criteria.