EBlogger

I’ve noticed that Britannica supports Amazon’s A9 OpenSearch protocol, by which you can obtain Britannica’s search results via RSS. For example, results for “Arunachal Pradesh” can be found at:

http://www.britannica.com/opensearch?ct=eb&start=0&count=20&query=arunachal+pradesh

See opensearch.a9.com for more information about the OpenSearch protocol. I don’t yet see an OpenSearch Description Document for Britannica.com, but it’s not difficult to see how to modify the query to get the results you are looking for.

Institutional customers should check out the new Encyclopedia Britannica Online site, released this morning. The new site features a clean design, new content, and new features. Existing customers can just visit new.search.eb.com (or follow the “preview” link in the header of search.eb.com). For everyone else, I’ve got screen shots:

Homepage

Search Results

Gateway to the Classics

Notable Quotations

Yo hablo muy poco español, but it seems that BibDigBlog offers a Firefox plug-in for searching multiple databases available to members of the institution, including ProQuest, Britannica, the Oxford dictionary and more. That’s a great idea. Do other universities do the same?

Alex Choo’s Super Search widget searches a staggering array of sites–including Britannica, Answers.com, Wikipedia, IMDB, Google and many many more–via a single, konfabulous interface.

Over at the Gordon’s Tech blog, John has posted something of a left-handed compliment for Britannica:

Next thing you know the freight trains will sprout rocket engines. Britannica gets sexy (in a geekish sort of way) with widgets and firefox search plugins. I guess I’ll have to reenable Dashboard on my iMac.

The amazing thing, however, is that their new RSS feed has over 150 bloglines subscribers. Wow.

I’d mostly forgotten I pay Britannica each month for their service. It’s kind of been a charitable act. Maybe they’re actually thinking about how they could be useful. Or maybe Google has agreed to buy them …

See Encyclopædia Britannica Online Tools for the “sexy” tools to which he refers.

Searchy is a tool that adds search engine shortcuts to IE (and Firefox, but there are better ways to do that), so that you can type “imdb Vertigo” into the location bar to search the IMDb for “Vertigo”. They provide a Britannica search plugin (type “b Mircea Eliade” to search Britannica.com for “Mircea Eliade”), among many others.

If you’re a Firefox user (and you should be ;)) you can now add Britannica.com to your quick search box. “Once installed, this plugin will provide quidck access to the content on the Encyclopædia Britannica Online site using the search engine box found in the top-right corner of Firefox browsers.”

YubNub takes the notion of search-form-as-command-line to a remarkable extreme, allowing quick access to an impressive set of commands by typing something like “mw augment” to the see Merriam-Webster definition for “augment” or random 100” to get a list of random numbers between 1 and 100.

YubNub has an eb command, which searches the Encyclopedia Britannica. For example, typing “eb sir raymond firth” will search Britannica for “sir raymond firth”.