Microsoft has partnered with Encyclopedia Britannia to boost its Bing search engine as it looks to take on Google.
The move follows Google’s new Knowledge Graph, which pulls out relevant stats, facts, stories and information about various search terms. For example, searching a popular actor’s name would bring up details from their Wikipedia and IMDB entries.
Encyclopedia Britannica announced in March that it had ditched plans for any future printed editions – instead choosing to embrace technology and only produce digital versions in future.
Bing expects to add Britannica results to more search returns in future. It said it would also pull in information from sites such as Wikipedia, Qwiki and Freebase.
Both Bing and Google seem to be matching each others’ search engine updates in recent weeks.
There could be huge ramifications for search engine optimisation, and pay per click services, if the top page of organic search results slowly changes to only display facts and stats from one or two trusted, encyclopaedic sources.
