Bing integrates New Britannica Encyclopedia information in search

Search engines are moving away from being a catalog of weighted websites to a service that goes beyond just that big time. Google for instance launched Knowledge Graph which is displaying information about important people, places or facts right on the search result's page. And my favorite search engine of them all, DuckDuckgo, displays zero-click information taken from Wikipedia and other sources on top of the search results. Unlike on Google, DuckDuckGo users can disable the feature should they not want to make use of it.

Bing too started to integrate information in its last redesign, and this apparently has just been the beginning. Yesterday the Bing Team announced that it has entered a partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica to bring encyclopedic information to the Bing search results.

Unlike on Google, where the information are displayed in a separate sidebar, the information on Bing are integrated into the search results. What's even more note worthy is that they do not necessarily appear as the top result or even above that result.

As you can see in the example above, the Britannica information are not displayed in the top spot or even the first four spots. The first entry is a Wikipedia page followed by links to Bing Image search, a related website, another Wikipedia page about another Dante, Bing News, and then finally the integrated information.

What's even more interesting in this regard are the links beneath the title and url. They link not only to the Britannica website, but also to Wikipedia, Freebase and Qwiki.A click on one of the links opens the selected site in the same browser tab.

Beneath that is an image depicting the person, item or location, one or two sentences with additional information, and two facts about the search term.

Including Encyclopedia Britannica information in the search results can be seen as a big step for Bing, as it is now again offering a service that Google is not offering to its users. Some Bing users may also like the fact that they now have links to multiple encyclopedias that they can check for information.

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