I have been playing with the Encyclopaedia Britannica which is available online to the ratepayers of Essex, along with a phenomenal number of other goodies, such as the OED, much of the Lexis-Nexis newspaper database, the DNB, and the Grove Dictionary of Music ($2,235.00 to you, sir, from Amazon, or £195.00 a year + VAT to read online).
In particular, I wanted to know about stones in the salivary ducts, one of which, my doctor told me this morning, is the cause of my present distress. On this topic, EB is less informative than wikipedia, and both are worse than the Merck Manual online. But the Encyclopaedia also boasts of its links to “selected web sources”, and here things get very strange. The search page gave me 8,317 hits on “Salivary glands”: of the top ten, two lead to 404 pages on WebMD, a pretty useless site even when it works. The other eight go to
- Facts about the Åland Islands
- Salaries in the state of Western Australia
- a Page about military history at the University of Texas, in Austin
- some WTO discussions about sanitation
- Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews magazine
- Some information about the eland from the African Wildlife Foundation
- and a 1999 press release from the American Federation of Teachers suggesting that Teacher Salary boost is one way to stem teacher shortages
When EB’s editors fulminate against the web, can it be because they use their own search engine?