An interesting idea: a meta-pedia browser add-on, to consult all public encyclopedias at the same time. Presenting the results as an elegant full-screen dashboard with a strip of side-links to Google Books, Archive.org, Scholar, JURN etc. Ideally with configurable sources…

* Wikipedia
* Current Britannica
* 1911 Britannica
* Specialist public encyclopedias is they exist for the topic, e.g. Philosophy, Catholic, Science-fiction etc.

I’m assuming this would need to be a browser add-on, as a cloud service that did this would face lawsuits and frame-busting scripts. The closest I can find is 2019’s free ResearchKit which shows Wikipedia and the current Britannica side-by-side, above bot-driven auto-summaries of their text. It’s not exactly elegant to look at it, but it works.

Obviously some fuzzy-lookup might be needed to align search topics, though the individual encyclopedias strive to do that on their pages via navigation strips and links.

But rather than jumping straight to a presumed page, perhaps each encyclopedia panel might first show sub-panels with a half-dozen ‘possible’ hits, colour-shaded by order of likely relevance to the search. If such a browser addon was in widespread use, the data gathered from such mass human-driven topic-selection/alignment might be rather useful, over time being judiciously used to augment existing ‘knowledge navigation trees’ that are able to cope at a meta-level with shifting topic titles (e.g. Aetheopia > Abyssinia > Horn of Africa > Eastern Africa > Ethiopia).

Another way to do it might be for the addon to ‘read’ such existing navigation on the encyclopedia pages, make its own deft distillation of such, and then use that to ‘prime’ with keywords the sidebar links to Google Books, Archive.org, Scholar, JURN etc.