digging around for recipients of britannica's web award - help appreciated!

Webweaving
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ahoy! so, i was looking for sites with folklore indexes and came across this page, which was not what i was looking for but DID have something else interesting on the homepage! a web award from the encyclopedia britannica!

bria
and a link to a quote;

“Our editors have selected your site as one of the best on the Internet when reviewed for quality, accuracy of content, presentation and usability. (…)
Britannica editors have rated (your site) one of the most valuable and reliable on the Internet”. - Britannica.com

googling and duckduckgo-ing “britannica internet guide award” turns up a good number of sites that mention having received this !

i am having a whole lot of trouble finding references to it from britannica though!

this writeup about receiving it from march 2001 mentions the “britannica internet guide” as a project of britannica india, interestingly - and i was able to find a link to a directory-style list of websites from their “best of the web” directory here via britannicaindia, but the site it was hosted on was britannica.com and not britannicaindia?!

there’s also this snapshot of the homepage which has a “site of the day” section (last working site of the day snapshot here)

i’m not sure if being featured in the internet guide/directory was considered “an award” - that would be kind of wild i think, since it had many thousands of sites in it and that’s a lot of emails to send in 1997-2001 - or if the award was a separate thing, maybe given to “sites of the day” or the sites that they rated most highly in the directory?

i’m getting pretty frustrated trying to navigate britannica’s several different websites, all of which seem to have been redesigned and rearranged many times and link to each other and redirect and etc etc etc. they had a separate site for the “britannica internet guide” called ebig (and also eBLAST?) for a little while, but that starts redirecting to britannica.com in 1999 already.
and britannica’s modern website suggests here that they had an internet guide of curated links included in some kind of subscription service confusingly called “britannica online” (which is different from their website)
it’s all kind of a mess it seems.

i asked the chatbot on britannica’s current website about the award but it just said there was no information on it in the database. britannica’s contact page doesn’t seem to have a point of contact for this that i could shoot an email to about this, either.

all this to say: i am looking for a list of winners of this award from britannica and maybe also some more information about the award! if anybody else wants to help with digging around or happens to know more about it or have a good way of searching, please do let me know. i’ve lost my patience for trying to poke around the wayback machine for now haha.

it seems like the sort of thing that would have a wikipedia article, but there is no mention of this award even existing on wikipedia! boo!

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Have you tried looking around on the Wayback Machine? I wonder if they used to have more information on the site.

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Really excited to see what you / others find! I saw the award for this on Chad Hansen’s website about Daoist philosophy, but didn’t get as far as you when looking into it.

Looking into it again, there’s a Wired article from 1997 that describes the product / press release at the time.

This link page from 1997 also uses the ebig.com site you refer above.

But sadly I can’t find a list or directory of the sites actually in the guide :frowning:
I did find a couple other sites of interest though

Wired compares Britannica’s Internet Guide to the Magellan / McKinley Internet directory, and you can see some websites will have awards from both. It looks like McKinley did publish their directory of websites…in print form lol. There’s a copy on Archive.org. It looks like McKinley is worth its own rabbit hole too: one of the earliest big names in Internet directories / search it looks like–and (??) founded by the sisters of Ghislaine Maxwell (?!)

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ah, maybe i wasn’t specific enough in my post - i’ve looked at the wayback machine a lot! the snapshots i linked are all from the wayback machine. the difficulty i’m having is that navigating the sites via the wayback machine is a pain because of how frequently they rearranged their redirects and links and stuff so it’s hard to figure out where things got moved to. it’s quite annoying!

@Neotoma - the wired article is interesting!! once again nobody talking about the “award” specifically… :mag::eyes:

i’ll do some more rooting around and update if/when i find more leads!

i’m glad at least mckinley bothered to properly archive their internet guide in print lmfao. i’ll probably check it out when i get sick of trying to chase down this britannica thing!

new wrinkle: this person got a compliment from the encyclopedia britannica internet guide and something called the Britannica-Newsweek Internet Guide. another new thing to juggle searching for!

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Interesting quest. I don’t think I can find anything you didn’t discover already, but since you didn’t mention it, I was surprised to see a picture of a physical trophy on that India Parenting page. Looks like the “winners” dropdown menu on the BIG Award page snapshot from Dec 4, 2001 still (sort of) works, so we can establish this much:

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  1. tineye reverse image search: https://tineye.com/search/eea18dd6305027c2c86b93082cda04779fcf14d0?sort=crawl_date&order=asc&page=1
  2. award recipient: https://messier.obspm.fr/award/award.html
  3. email to recipient: https://messier.obspm.fr/award/britannica.txt
  4. T&C at Britannica: https://web.archive.org/web/20000303005428/http://britannica.com/awards/awards.htm
  5. A search page at Britannica: https://web.archive.org/web/20001118083600/http://search.britannica.com/bcom/search/results/1,5843,,00.html?p_query0=messier

The search results include three columns and the first is labeled “The Web’s Best Sites.” Possibly this had been hand-curated and the award recipients were highly rated there.

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thanks so much for the additional links, @Coyote and @memo !! i totally missed the trophy coyote noticed, and that snapshot with the britannicaindia award winners is so useful!

based on the information collected so far, i’m gathering a few things - britannica was doing a lot of rapid reshuffling and renaming and throwing things at the wall in the late 90s through 2001. (and possibly later)

this person who received an award says:

Those Encyclopaedia Britannica people also run an
excellent value-added combined search engine and directory. It’s actually quite good, however they don’t seem to be able to decide whether to charge for it – it started off as a paid-for service, then went free, and is now back to subscription only (although you can take a free trial). Probably best to try the free sites first before you shell out your money.

so they were going back and forth on what the service was, whether it was free, what it was named, et cetera. in addition to memo’s, i’ve found a couple different emails posted that read like form emails but are different form emails:

this page says they got the award and has this button displayed instead of the green one on the link exchange page! (the filename calls it “iguide”)
britannica_iguide_blue not sure if this is a rebrand thing or a different tier of award thing or what, but figured i’d note it anyway.

it seems like from the sites i’ve found so far that even though britannica launched the directory in 1997, they didn’t start emailing people until 2000? but most places i’ve found so far don’t say when they received the award or provide the email contents, so it’s entirely possible plenty of them got their emails earlier than 2000.

at this point my understanding is that the britannica internet guide award organized by britannicaindia was a separate thing that was far more organized as well as being an actual award with a jury and a physical trophy; i haven’t found anything that suggests that the non-india award had a jury or a trophy or even a schedule.

i’ve got a spreadsheet goin; at some point i’m going to cross-reference the links i’ve collected so far via websearching with the directory that is accessible via wayback machine and note down their star ratings.

still unsure about which of these possible meanings of the “award” are true;

  • every website included in the Britannica Internet Guide directory, period
  • every website included in the paid version of the directory
  • every website added to the britannica internet guide directory between 2000-2001
  • websites in the directory which received a “site of the day” spotlight or other prominent feature on the britannica website
  • websites in the directory which received a 4 or 5 star rating
  • same as the britannicaindia BIG; a juried award given to sites picked out of a selection from the directory
    • this but given to sites from internet at large & losers were added to the directory but not given an award
  • something else entirely

but more cross-referencing and taking notes will help narrow things down!

once again thank you so much for the help, everybody. please do link more stuff if you happen upon it, even if you think i may have seen it already! there’s a lot of fiddly variations and leads to be chasing down and i am not being terribly thorough!

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