Encyclopedia Britannica 2006

Avanquest’s Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006 DVD offers an impressive amount of content—100,000 individual articles, according to the box. However, finding the exact information you want may not prove easy. The program includes a basic search field as well as the ability to browse by letter, subject, and media type. The advanced search gives you just three options with which to narrow down your keyword search: you can choose whether the article should include any of the words, all of the words, or the exact phrase.

The program’s interface is also puzzling: It opens each article in its own tab (much like Safari and Firefox’s tabbed browsing). However, Britannica splits articles by education level, so you might have different entries on the same subject for General, Student Library, and Elementary Library. Each of these levels gets its own tab at the top of the interface, while underneath is an additional set of tabs that contain all the actual articles regardless of the educational level you select. This makes the interface very cluttered and confusing. Plus, if you want to take notes while researching in Britannica, you have to copy and paste to another application.

Britannica contains tens of thousands of individual articles.


The one new feature in Britannica 2006 is the homework help desk. However, this appears to be little more than a collection of instructional articles on writing papers and links to content accessible elsewhere in the interface.

Britannica does have two standout features, though: the BrainStormer and Timeline. BrainStormer allows you to view an article topic in a flowchart style, making it easy to see connections between related subjects. Both World Book and Britannica include timelines (useful for getting historical overviews), but while Britannica links its timeline items to articles, World Book, inexplicably, does not.