Introducing Mashpedia the Real-Time Encyclopedia

A close cousin to search engines are the so-called discovery engines, the most prominent one being Kosmix, but perhaps you have heard of Worio or YourVersion. Once you enter a query, the basic idea is to return a multitude of results grouped by category so that you can browse through them and ‘discover’ things you might not have even been searching for.

Entering this fray is Mashpedia. Mashpedia provides real-time selections for specific topics, like an encyclopedia, aggregating (or ‘mashing,’ hence the name) content from Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and other sources. And like an encyclopedia, it is only for certain people and topics, and not for all search terms.

Kosmix, on the other hand, strives to return results for any query from: Flickr, Download.com, Bing, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, YouTube, Clipta, Omgili, Truveo, Fixya, and several other sources – whew!

YourVersion chooses to not display all of the categories down one long page like Kosmix does, but rather keeps the information at the top of the page by using simple tabs to go from one category to the next. It’s nice to not have to scroll, but you can only view one category at a time.

So which one is the best? You just have to try them once to see which ones have too much information, too little, how it is displayed, and for you is the one that is Just Right.