Aneki.com is a free Canadian Web site. The site consists of yearbook‐style information on the world's countries, taken from the CIA World Factbook, United Nations agencies, and other sources, plus extensive advertisements. The site was also recently assessed in Choice (Yeager, 2003).
Information for each country includes location, population, capital city, and gross domestic product. There are links to a detailed profile and a map of the country's borders and principal cities. (Continent relief maps appear in the continent sections.) Detailed profiles include geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues such as politics and drugs. The left‐hand navigation sidebar links to data on world regions and countries, maps, lists of major cities, and embassies in the USA. The right‐hand links show rankings of countries by category: economic, social, technological, environmental, academic, and miscellaneous. Miscellaneous items of interest include countries where major languages such as English, Spanish, or Arabic are spoken; country Internet domains; national holidays; and so on. The “In the news” category currently includes links to the profiles for Georgia, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan.
Navigation is straightforward: select a country from the regions on the left bar or from the drop‐down boxes for countries and categories on the home page. For country rankings, choose from the right‐hand bar. The information provided in each category is brief, but some statistics, such as the HIV/AIDS rates for each country, may be available in only a few other sources. Most profiles appear to have been updated as recently as August, 2003. They derive in large part from the CIA World Factbook, a public domain source available online (www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html).
By comparison, the CIA World Factbook has more navigational aids for the country information. Other print yearbooks such as The Statesman's Yearbook (RR 2003/55) and the International Yearbook and Statesman's Who's Who may provide more information overall. Nevertheless, Aneki.com gives the user information those tools do not provide including advertisements for goods and services related to travel in various countries, US and international marketing information, online stores for flags, maps, news services for countries and regions, and so on.
One interesting feature of Aneki.com is Ads by Google, using Google's search technologies and its database of advertisers to match advertisements to the content on the Web pages currently being viewed. Advertisers range from Amazon.com to small local enterprises. Since the advertising is complex and perhaps harder to locate elsewhere than the information on countries, an index to advertisers by name or category would be a welcome addition. In this reviewer's opinion, the flashing, brilliantly coloured banner advertisements detract from a useful site that has real potential because it combines information with relevant shopping opportunities.
