{"id":56,"date":"2006-05-08T15:39:40","date_gmt":"2006-05-08T19:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2006-05-08T15:39:40","modified_gmt":"2006-05-08T19:39:40","slug":"the-worlds-wierdest-search-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"the world’s wierdest search engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been playing with the Encyclopaedia Britannica<\/em> which is available online to the ratepayers of Essex, along with a phenomenal number of other goodies, such as the OED, <\/span>much of the Lexis-Nexis newspaper database, the DNB, <\/span>and the Grove Dictionary of Music<\/em> ($2,235.00 to you, sir, from Amazon, or £195.00 a year + VAT <\/span>to read online).
\nIn 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<\/em> is less informative than wikipedia,<\/a> and both are worse than the Merck Manual<\/a> online. But the Encyclopaedia<\/em> 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”: <\/span> of the top ten, two lead to 404 pages on WebMD, a pretty useless site even when it works. The other eight go to<\/p>\n\n\n