XRefer Reference Search Engine Rolling Out Plus Version

Extremely handy reference search engine XRefer ( http://www.xrefer.com ) is rolling out a Plus version, xreferplus ( http://www.xreferplus.com/ ) and is seeking librarians to help beta-test the new site. (It's rolling out at the end of the year)

The new site will have about 100 sources (XRefer has about 55) with over 1,000,000 entries. I took it for a test drive.

It looks very similar to XRefer. You can browse the sources from a topic list on the front page. You can use lists of sources in each topic to build a "search selected titles" query. xreferplus does offer a regular keyword search, but in addition it offers an advanced search engine that allows you to specify phrase searching, search for "sounds like" matches, and exclude words(Very handy -- I find myself getting snagged sometimes on XRefer's searching.)

Search results themselves look to my eyes exactly like they did on XRefer: results in the middle of the page. Click a result and you get the entry on the right side of the page with cross-references on the left.

Alas, xreferplus is offering only library subscriptions based on the size of the library. Thus the call for beta-testers who are librarians. If you're a librarian and you want to put this new offering through its paces, you can sign up here:
http://www.xrefer.com/trial/library/library_survey.jsp.

Posted to Reference-Search