Hi all,
I took a some time out the past few days and used my developing Perl skills to write an encyclopedia meta-search engine, which will at least temporarily live at:
http://www.seeatown.com/search/
The default settings search only four encyclopedias, but you can choose from up to 18 (and counting). You can change the encyclopedias searched on the settings page.
I hope you find this useful! Obviously, I think Wikipedia and Nupedia should write articles better than all the articles you'll see via this interface. ;-) But it should be a useful way to get a benchmark idea of what we want out of a basic encyclopedia article on a topic.
I could really use your help in finding more encyclopedia-type websites to include. The way the script is written now, one requirement is that the source website's search results page reproduce the search terms in the URL (i.e., for those who know about HTML forms, the website should use "GET" rather than "POST").
Feature requests are also welcome.
By the way, in coding and testing this website I discovered (at least to my own satisfaction) that Wikipedia is far and away the most complete *free* (gratis) resource online.
Larry