the world’s wierdest search engine

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

When EB’s editors fulminate against the web, can it be because they use their own search engine?

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