A Homework Guidance Guru

The new "instant reference look-up" from the Atomica Corporation (www.gurunet.com) offers answers to searches with quick "snapshots" that feature definitions and facts on topics. Some snapshots come with such details as biographies, photos, encyclopedia terms, acronyms, and translations. The resource also features technical terms, news, sports, weather, and maps. It won't return dozens of links from standard sources either. "Our approach is to provide a pre-built, pre-assessed, pre-formatted virtual library so that our customers can avoid having to take the Google route," says Jay Bailey, GuruNet's Director of Marketing and Product Management. "[That is], tediously moving link by link until they find a Web page with the info they want."

Another one of its selling points is that it aims to cancel out the fear of dredging up unreliable or inappropriate sources. That's because GuruNet uses external search engines that are "child-friendly." "Naturally, this is attractive in a school setting because there's some pretty scary stuff out there," says Bailey. It accesses more than 100 trusted and authoritative reference sources. The entry on Baghdad, for example, comes from Columbia University Press. It gives the city's history as well as links to related topics, such as the Persian Gulf War. The definition for habeas corpus comes from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, while Who2 supplies the snapshot of basketball player Yao Ming.

GuruNet runs on PCs, and MAC and Linux versions are in the works. A site license costs $399 per year per school building for up to 100 PCs. A single license is $39.99, with a 30-day guarantee.

The regular version of GuruNet enables users to make custom tabs to submit topics to any site, including a company intranet, Google images, and Microsoft's Help Desk. But this Web content obviously can be a "leak" as far as child-friendliness is concerned.