/* ---- Google Analytics Code Below */

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Encarta Killed Britannica

I well remember when Encarta became available on Windows.  The simple encyclopedia was bought by Microsoft and we installed it for tests in some admin offices and fed the results back to MS.    It was good, but not as complete as was required for administrative staff.  Still it was used daily for general information access.  Later, as the Web became more commonly accessible, most people switched to searches.   Large encyclopedias were in the library, some distance away, thus was not often used.    An article in Wired describes the advent of Encarta.   The Wikipedia became commonly used and a standard along with Web search.  In the last five years the first entry in a Google search is often from the Wikipedia.  For better or worse, often it became a default source knowledge.

No comments: