Reference Search Engine Gets to the Facts

xrefer.com ( http://www.xrefer.com) last week announced the launch of a "reference engine" -- basically a meta-search of 19 reference titles, including

Oxford Dictionary of Art

Concise Medical Dictionary, Oxford University Press

Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

Penguin Dictionary of Psychology

Penguin Dictionary of Sociology

The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music

The design is very clean -- a search box in the middle of the home page. This engine works like most engines, but there is one syntax you should know about; if you're not sure how to spell something, but a tilde in front of it. ~chapplin found Charlie Chaplin, but also Chaliapin Fyodor. You can search for a number of things, including people, places, or even quote keywords. I noticed that people's names seemed to work best. Richard Feynman, for example, got over 200 results, with encyclopedia entries on the top.

Clicking on a search result will take you to the reference entry (very brief, occasionally) with cross references on the direct right and adjacent entries on the lower right. The cross references are most useful to researchers, with the adjacent entries being of more use to a browser. There's a LOT to browse here.

There are lots of resources on the Web that search a variety of reference -- Information Please jumps immediately to mind. But the clean layout and crossreferencing of xrefer.com make this one a winner. Worth a look.

Posted to