Splinters

I just found a new Aussie search engine called Fact Bites that is a real help for tracking down info on authors. Instead of a list of random links, FactBites returns fully coherent sentences of information extracted from each source, so that it's easy to skim down the page to quickly get a feel for the content. What's impressive is that it feels like the page has been assembled by a human, so good is the context of the summarised quotes. I tripped over FactBites as it referred to Steve's Paul Celan article here on Spike from its own Paul Celan page. The FactBites layout is also very uncluttered. It's not so good for general searches, but for looking up specific people, it's a gold mine: I tried Maurice Blanchot, Derek Jarman and Martin Amis as three random names and FactBites came back with a ton of well-ordered information about each. Give it a whirl.

More on FactBites:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia