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Screenshot  Screenshot of Britannica.com on 26 June 2024 | |
Type of site | Online encyclopaedia |
|---|---|
| Available in | British English |
| Headquarters | Chicago ,United States |
| Owner | Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. |
| Editor | Jason Tuohey[1] |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | Yes |
Content licence | All rights reserved |
| ISSN | 1085-9721 |
Britannica.com is thedomain name of the main website ofEncyclopædia Britannica,[2] which provides partial free access to the paidonline edition of the encyclopaedia, titledEncyclopaedia Britannica.[3] The paid edition is known asBritannica Academic,[3] previouslyBritannica Online.[4]
As of 2025, Britannica.com had over 130,000 different entires covering a wide variety of topics,[5] with asearch bar allowing navigation to specific entries. In 2000, in addition to the main encyclopedia text, Britannica.com was reported to include "current news, an internet guide that ranks Websites, theMerriam-Webster Dictionary and additional tools".[4]
Britannica was first launched online in 1994 as eb.com, which required a paid subscription to access. In 1999 the free website Britannica.com was launched, which contained the full text of the encyclopedia, as well as "an Internet search engine, subject channels, current events, and essays".[6] The website was so popular that it crashed on several occasions following launch.[6][7] Britannica.com later offered a subscription fee to remove advertising. eb.com was initially retained alongside Britannica.com for institutional subscribers such as schools and libraries.[6] While Britannica.com was initially completely free to use and supported by advertising,[4] by 2012 it had put up a partialpaywall, requiring a subscription to fully access the website's content.[8] As of 2009[update], roughly 60% ofEncyclopædia Britannica's revenue came from online operations, of which around 15% came from subscriptions to the consumer version of the websites.[9] In 2012 Britannica Inc. discontinued the print edition of theEncyclopaedia Britannica, leaving the Britannica.com as the main version of the encyclopedia.[8][10] In 2024, the website began incorporatingAI features, such as alarge language model–basedchatbot as part of the early 2020sAI boom.[11][12]
Robert Rossney, writing in Wired shortly after the launch of eb.com in 1995, was skeptical of the need of encyclopedias in the internet age, stating that "Given that the Web itself is becoming the sum of the world's knowledge, isn't putting the Encyclopaedia Britannica online a spectacularly useless thing to do?"[13]
In 2005, the journalNature chose articles from Britannica.com andWikipedia in a wide range of science topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles—one from each site on a given topic—side by side, but were not told which article came from which site.Nature got back 42 usable reviews. The journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts: four from each site. It also discovered many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 inBritannica, an average of 3.86 mistakes per article for Wikipedia and 2.92 forBritannica.[14][15]
AlthoughBritannica was revealed as the more accurate encyclopaedia, with fewer errors, in its rebuttal, it calledNature's study flawed and misleading[16] and called for a "prompt" retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from aBritannica yearbook and not the encyclopaedia, and another two were fromCompton's Encyclopedia (called theBritannica Student Encyclopedia on the company's website).
Nature defended its story and declined to retract, stating that, as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version ofBritannica, it used whatever relevant material was available onBritannica's website.[17] Interviewed in February 2009, the managing director ofBritannica UK said:
Wikipedia is a fun site to use and has a lot of interesting entries on there, but their approach wouldn't work forEncyclopædia Britannica. My job is to create more awareness of our very different approaches to publishing in the public mind. They're a chisel, we're a drill, and you need to have the correct tool for the job.[9]
