Not (thank God) pubs with Internet terminals, but the growing number of guides in electronic form. Johansens offers its guide on CD-ROM, while you can stroll through other guides via online services. An oddity in the CD-ROM market is Le Routiers as part of Microsoft AutoRoute Express. I haven't included this in the paper guides as has too many cafΘs and restaurants, but it does provide an excellent example of how an electronic guide should work. Click on a location, then drag a slider to say how far you want to travel: you are told what is within that radius and can simply click on a place to get an effective description, with a short list of food specialities though no mention of beer. The bizarre thing about Le Routiers is that most pubs in the other guides aren't here and vice versa. It's as if the French truckers' bible lived in a different world.

Of the UK's big three added value services, CompuServe impresses most with the Good Pub Guide, available on Internet (but only via CompuServe) at http://www.compuserve.co.uk/gpg. It's a shame though that you can only search on county, town or pub name - there's an opportunity to be much more flexible online. MSN has nothing to offer yet, while AOL features the Time Out guides to London, Glasgow and Edinburgh. These are pretty good in content, not dissimilar to the Good Pub Guide, and can search by name or location, but nothing fancier. There's also a facility for members to post their own reviews, though when I checked there were only two of them for London. Putting 'Pub Guide' into a search engine comes up with plenty of little local guides - e.g. the pubs of Maidenhead (no, really), but little wide coverage. I'm not totally convinced by the Licensee pub guide's http://www.licensee.co.uk/search.htm claim to be 'the ultimate guide' as it hasn't got much content, and some of the featured pubs would raise the eyebrows of the mainstream guides.