iSpecies, Living Thing Roundup Engine

I don't know what else to call a search engine that pulls a variety of information from several places on the fly. iSpecies describes itself as "a test of E O Wilson's idea of a web page for each species." You can try it at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/.

Searching is spartan; just search for the name of an animal. I searched for Giraffa camelopardalis. I got a page of results gathered from different places; genomics, images (from Google Images) and articles from Google Scholar. I opened another window and searched for Giraffa camelopardalis by its more common name, giraffe.

I got different sets of results for each search; different articles and different photographs. However the scientific name was at the top of both results, so if you're searching for an animal by its common name, be sure to run another search for its scientific name.

Also fun, adding modifiers to the animal name. Results for albino cat or feral cat were much more specific and useful than a general cat search. And don't stick to real animals either -- searching for centaur brings both images and papers from Google Scholar in its results, including the intriguing "Observational constraints on the Centaur population." as the last result.

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