In January 2014, Google made a fundamental change[1] to its search product: It started showing answers to user queries directly in so-called snippets, no further clicks required. But what started out as a time-saver has morphed into a repeated source of misleading and outright false information[2], thanks to Google's frequent reliance on untrusted sources. The product has, among other things, declared[3] that Barack Obama is the "king" of the United States and reported that dinosaurs are being used[4] to trick people into thinking the world is millions of years old. It's a distinctly modern problem that finds one possible solution in a 250-year-old business: Encyclopædia Britannica.
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[5], Google has instead featured incorrect information from Wikipedia and random blogs. It's those failures that Britannica wants to help mitigate with its new Chrome extension, Britannica Insights[6], which supplements Google's featured snippets with accurate information.
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[7]," the technical term 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. It