According to Gary Price at Resource Shelf, GuruNet has become Answsers.com and is now offering a ready reference search engine for free. Answers.com culls its information from a variety of free and pay sources, including Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, Merriam Webster, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, SparKNotes, Who2, and Wikipedia. The user submits a query and gets a page full of entries from several of the sources as well as related links to outside sources. They also offer a free downloadable answer bar (for Windows and Mac OSX) as well as a related Firefox extension. It’s a pretty cool addition to the growing list of excellent free reference websites available to the public.
