Thoughts for the Day, Various Web Tools

I have started reading Oil by Upton Sinclair. The writing is very dense with a lot to say about industry, labor, and human motives. It will take me a considerable amount of time to read this book. At least four or five days. The writing has real substance to it. It is about as dense as Dostoevsky in its writing style. I am surprised that they were able to make this book into a movie. It does not seem to be very cinematic at all. There is a lot of internal dialogue by the characters in the book.

This almost seems to have nothing to do with anything at all. I keep track of many of the websites and webtools that I use on a personal web index. I have been using http://www.backflip.com/ for many years to store links to sites of interest.

I am going to suggest a few web tools and search engines which I like to use a lot. The first is a downloadable search utility called Webferret, it has been around for many years. If I am going to do any really serious web searching, it is a utility which I add to my desktop.
http://www.webferret.com/more/ Some people like Copernic better which has both a free and a pay utility.

If I want to search for free databases on the web on specific subjects, I will turn to Completeplanet. This is useful for searching for information directories and searchable lists.
It has indexed over 70,000 sites with specialty database search tools inside them.
http://www.completeplanet.com/

If you want to search for a person by either phone number or email address, one of the best search engines for locating people on the web is Yahoo People Search:
http://people.yahoo.com/

Similarly if you are looking for executive information and want an easy biographical search engine to use there is:
http://www.zoominfo.com/


If you are looking for an excellent focused metasearch engine which gives a very short list of results, Mamma is quite good because of the limited results it gives.
http://www.mamma.com/

My favorite place to look for public domain or creative commons images is Wikimedia.org
http://www.wikimedia.org/


I just felt like suggesting a few web tools that researchers often use who have some specialty skills on the internet. These tools have all been useful to me at some point in my career. This is far from comprehensive.

Anyways, the last few days have been very busy. I am on jury duty which is tedious and difficult at times. I went to a really bad restaurant at noon with Americanized Italian food. I'll remember to bring my lunch tomorrow. Sitting in court has been very revealing, but I can't really talk about it too much.

I am not going to work which is kind of interesting. It really breaks up my day very differently.