August 22, 2002

8:48 AM

xrefer is billing itself as The Web's Reference Engine, and with 100 reference manuals cross-linked and indexed, it may have support for that claim. I found it last night while looking for a definition for the word eyot, which is where Frodo and Sam camp at one point near the end of the Fellowship of the Ring. The site is easy to use, and provides (at least in my mind) the feeling of browsing at the library, with all the related links that appear in a search context.
posted by hurkle (7 comments total)

They don't seem to incude the jargon file, and I couldn't find any references to Steve Gadd. On the one hand, that means that everything that xrefer can tell me about, I probably do not know anything about. On the other hand, it means that people can't use it to learn anything about my worlds.
posted by e.e. coli at 9:18 AM on August 22, 2002

That's pretty durned cool.
posted by vraxoin at 9:34 AM on August 22, 2002

I was really impressed by the results I got for the ontological argument.

This is a powerful tool that has a great UI like Google but fills a substantial niche. Maybe xrefer is the answer to some of my questions, and I'll definitely be using if for research.
posted by insomnyuk at 9:45 AM on August 22, 2002

excellent, lovely and easy to use. thanks for the link
posted by quarsan at 10:51 AM on August 22, 2002

Nice find.
posted by willnot at 7:00 PM on August 22, 2002

It's not that obscure.
posted by dhartung at 7:17 PM on August 22, 2002

Many weblogs have it on their sites, Rageboy, John Duemer and mine just to mention a few very powerful tool.
posted by onegoodmove at 8:02 PM on August 23, 2002