Top Ten Research Tools
According to CNET
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1. Encyclopedia Britannica
In an era of free content, ponying up for expert information still pays off. Britannica's $49
digital encyclopedia draws upon an astute legacy of more than two centuries, offering entries
vetted by Nobel Prize winners and ready-made citations for your term papers. This version is faster
than its predecessor, and the DVD purchase includes access to Britannica articles online. You
weren't really going to cite Wikipedia as the last word in your final project, were you?
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2. Wikipedia
You might shun this online, open-source encyclopedia if you've ever been burned by prank entries or fudged
facts. But because anyone can edit Wikipedia, it's a richer resource than Britannica for subjects off
the beaten path, such as the 1960s underground press or rivethead subculture. Though it's not the
only source you should reference in term papers, at least Wikipedia gets you started.
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3. FeedDemon
Many free RSS services let you subscribe to oodles of news sources that so you don't have to hopscotch
from site to site to get the scoop. But the $29 FeedDemon 2 is the best RSS reader for steamrolling through
thousands of feeds. Need headlines from the science section of the world's major newspapers? Check.
Want the latest research from insider blogs about solar power? Check. FeedDemon is faster and more customizable than browser-based freebies, and it also lets you access feeds online.
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4. Diigo beta
How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article?
Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo's Del.icio.us would: highlight
text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just
the topic tags. And you won't have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save
bookmarks simultaneously in both places.
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5. Google Scholar beta
Google Scholar searches journals in the arts and humanities, business, science, medicine, and mathematics.
It turns up abstracts and sometimes full articles that are indispensable for academic and professional
research and points to libraries that keep the hard copies. One downside: Scholar doesn't let you
subscribe to newsfeeds for your search queries, while rival Windows Live Academic beta does.
So far, however, Scholar retrieves more content.
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6. Google Book Search
Google's goal to digitize the world's libraries has hit some copyright snags, but Mountain View
continues to sign deals with universities, scan books, and put their pages online. You can read
the entire text of books in the public domain or see excerpts from, say, Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot,
before committing to buy the hard copy. Props are due to Project Gutenberg, the first major effort to
make e-books free.
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7. Yahoo Answers
When you're stumped about something, asking a knowledgeable person can cut to the chase better than a
Google query. But what if there are no experts on, say, epiphytes in your circle of friends? Pose
that question about rare orchids to Yahoo Answers, and you're sure to find a green thumb among
the tens of millions of users. Among rival social search sites, we found the widest array of
explanations on the broadest range of subjects at Yahoo Answers. However, the site can be cluttered by
amateurs, so be patient.
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8. Windows Live Local
Although Yahoo Maps beta won our Editors' Choice award, Windows Live Local innovates in ways that are
ideal for research. You can save locations to your account and even mark up maps with pushpins and by
coloring in routes and regions. You could use these features to impress your history teacher, for
instance, with a customized map drawing that shows where ancient Native Americans lived in your town.
And Local is powered by Redmond's impressive Virtual Earth technology, which makes for some stunning
satellite views.
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9. Google Earth 4
Google Maps first made satellite views of the planet free on the Web. But the Google Earth download
gets you even closer, letting you fly around the globe, zoom in for a closer view, and add your own
landmarks with Google SketchUp. If research brings you back to the land, Google Earth is an essential ally.
For instance, environmentalists fighting mountaintop removal mining used Google Earth to assemble a
virtual tour of the damage done.
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10. Google Home
Google Home organizes your newsfeeds, site bookmarks, maps, stock quotes, e-books, podcasts, calculators,
currency converters, dictionary lookups, language translators, search histories, yellow pages--hold on,
we're out of breath. Anyway, you can drag all that onto one simple Google sign-in screen that goes
wherever you do, with some advantages over Netvibes and others.
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