Britannica.com is the domain name of the main website of "Encyclopædia Britannica", which provides partial free access to the paid online edition of the encyclopaedia, titled "Encyclopaedia Britannica". The paid edition is known as Britannica Academic, previously Britannica Online.
Content.
As of 2025, Britannica.com had over 130,000 different entires covering a wide variety of topics, with a search bar allowing navigation to specific entries. In 2000, in addition to the main encyclopedia text, Britannica.com was reported to include "current news, an internet guide that ranks Websites, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and additional tools".
History.
Britannica was first launched online in 1994 as eb.com, which required a paid subscription to access. In 1999 the free website Britannica.com was launched, which contained the full text of the encyclopedia, as well as "an Internet search engine, subject channels, current events, and essays". The website was so popular that it crashed on several occasions following launch. Britannica.com later offered a subscription fee to remove advertising. eb.com was initially retained alongside Britannica.com for institutional subscribers such as schools and libraries. While Britannica.com was initially completely free to use and supported by advertising, by 2012 it had put up a partial paywall, requiring a subscription to fully access the website's content. , roughly 60% of "Encyclopædia Britannica's" revenue came from online operations, of which around 15% came from subscriptions to the consumer version of the websites. In 2012 Britannica Inc. discontinued the print edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", leaving the Britannica.com as the main version of the encyclopedia. In 2024, the website began incorporating AI features, such as a large language model-based chatbot as part of the early 2020s AI boom.
Reception.
Robert Rossney, writing in Wired shortly after the launch of eb.com in 1995, was skeptical of the need of encyclopedias in the internet age, stating that "Given that the Web itself is becoming the sum of the world's knowledge, isn't putting the Encyclopaedia Britannica online a spectacularly useless thing to do?"
2005 Nature study vs Wikipedia.
In 2005, the journal "Nature" chose articles from Britannica.com and Wikipedia in a wide range of science topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles—one from each site on a given topic—side by side, but were not told which article came from which site. "Nature" got back 42 usable reviews. The journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts: four from each site. It also discovered many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in "Britannica", an average of 3.86 mistakes per article for Wikipedia and 2.92 for "Britannica".
Although "Britannica" was revealed as the more accurate encyclopaedia, with fewer errors, in its rebuttal, it called "Nature"'s study flawed and misleading and called for a "prompt" retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from a "Britannica" yearbook and not the encyclopaedia, and another two were from "Compton's Encyclopedia" (called the "Britannica Student Encyclopedia" on the company's website).
"Nature" defended its story and declined to retract, stating that, as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version of "Britannica", it used whatever relevant material was available on "Britannica" website. Interviewed in February 2009, the managing director of "Britannica UK" said: