Encyclopedia Britannica might have just found another way to
stay relevant in the digital age where Wikipedia, random blogs and self-proclaimed
experts feed us inaccurate information.
Its new Chrome extension, Britannica Insights, aims to
supplement Google's so-called snippets – automatic answers to user queries that
show up on the side of search results - with accurate information from its 250-year-old business.
Since January 2014, when Google started showing answers to
user queries directly in so-called snippets, a time-saver for most basic
inquiries, has morphed into a repeated source of misleading and outright false
information, thanks to Google's frequent reliance on untrusted sources. The
product has, among other things, declared that Barack Obama is the
"king" of the United States and reported that dinosaurs are being
used to trick people into thinking the world is millions of years old. It's
those failures that Britannica wants to help mitigate with.
Snippets aren't all bad. When you ask Google why the sky is
blue, it offers a reasonable explanation: "Blue light is scattered in all
directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth's atmosphere," an answer
it sourced from NASA. But in many other circumstances, Google has instead
featured incorrect information from Wikipedia and random blogs. When you search
Google with Britannica Insights installed, the extension will populate
information from the encyclopedia above or alongside Google's own featured
snippet. For example, next to the result from NASA, Britannica Insights
displays its entry for "Rayleigh scattering," the technical term for
the physics phenomenon that turns the sky blue.
The tool works best for that sort of scientific or
historical question. It likely won't help mitigate, say, fake political news.
If you search for "Who is Alex Jones," Britannica can't help you.
Which is fine by the encyclopedia, as it seeks only to play a part in a
hopefully collaborative fight against false information online, and hopes to show
the world that there are multiple sources to get good information from.
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