Britannica Insights also potentially gains the company some relevance in the Wikipedia era. A number of platforms, including both Facebook and Google-owned YouTube, now use Wikipedia to help establish ground truth. Because all of its articles are Creative Commons works, tech companies can freely use the volunteer-run encyclopedia for all sorts of purposes, like training voice-enabled assistants and other types of artificial intelligences.

Tech companies haven't leaned on Britannica in the same way partially because it's a for-profit company; the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia. Like many digital media businesses, Britannica runs ads and offers exclusive content to paying members. (Though it says it isn't collecting any data from the Chrome extension.) Unlike Wikipedia, its business model allows it to employ a paid staff who edit articles. That makes Britannica largely immune from the sort of digital vandalism that has caused a series of headaches for Google recently.

Just last week, furious members of the California Republican Party noticed a Google featured snippet said their ideology was "Nazism." A rogue Wikipedia editor had briefly inserted the false information; it was edited out again six days later. These sorts of troubles plague Google's featured snippets fairly regularly, but this instance caused particular alarm because it occurred less than a week before California's primary elections. A day later, another snippet misleadingly labeled one of the same state's senators a "BIGOT" by relying on information from a 2012 blog post.

Aside from serving up misinformation, Google's snippets have also cratered online media businesses that rely on traffic from search engines, as The Outline has previously reported. Despite all the trouble it causes, Google likely won't ditch the feature, especially because it keeps people on their platform. Featured snippets are also often correct and provide users with quick and easy-to-digest answers to their questions, even when they're inherently subjective, like "How do I be a good person?" (That query serves up bullet points from a 2014 Inc. article). They also are likely going to become especially important as voice assistants become more prevalent.

Britannica knows all this, so instead of continuing to solely write comprehensive articles, it has chosen to get into the featured snippet game itself, circumventing Google entirely.

'The world needs to know that there are multiple sources to get good information.' Karthik Krishnan, Encyclopædia Britannica Group

It might seem strange for Britannica to suddenly build web tools. After all, the organization is best-known for selling hardcover encyclopedias, even though it shuttered its print edition five years ago. But that notion doesn't take into account Britannica's long history with the web. It joined the internet in 1994, four years before Google was founded and six years before Wikipedia launched. Its new Chrome extension is also far from its first online experiment; in 2008 it briefly tried allowing anyone to contribute edits to its articles, just like Wikipedia, except edits were approved by staff members.

At least for historical topics, Britannica Insights does seem more adept at surfacing relevant facts than Google snippets. If you look up the French Revolution for example, it gives you a list of links to key events, people, and topics—handy resources any time-crunched student would appreciate. Google's knowledge panel, meanwhile, suggests you also check out the American revolution.

More Great WIRED Stories