Taxonomic Search Engine (TSE) is a federated search engine to query multiple taxonomic databases using web services. It is written in PHP. A paper describing the architecture has been published in BMC Bioinformatics.
TSE can be downloaded from SourceForge.
TSE requires PHP 4 and various libraries. If you want to explore support for LSIDs you will need Perl. On a reasonably recent Unix system this shouldn't be a problem, but your mileage may vary. To get started look at the requirements, then work through the installation steps.
As a user you type in a taxonomic name, click on “go” and TSE does the search. To see an example installation visit TSE at Glasgow.
TSE was written by Rod Page.