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.
GuruNet now offers Answers.com for free!
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Meredith Farkas
1/4/2005
Last updated on 1/4/2005
Meredith Farkas is a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon. From 2007-2021, she wrote the monthly column “Technology in Practice” for American Libraries. Meredith was honored in 2014 with the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award, in 2008 and 2011 with the WISE Excellence in Online Education Award and in 2009 with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. She has been writing the blog Information Wants to be Free since 2004.
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