findingDulcinea

Sweet Sites | Name That Tune: Nailing Down Music & Lyrics on the Web

It’s a universal experience: there’s a song, or part of a song, that you just can’t get out of your head. Unfortunately, you can’t remember the name of the song or the band who sang it. But fear not: the Internet was invented to solve agonizing conundrums like this. (Okay, maybe the Internet wasn’t specifically designed to help you cope with your earworm problem, but it seems like it might have been.)

Did you first hear the song a few weeks ago as Dr. Gregory House moodily limped/stomped through the hospital or when, for the millionth time, Chuck failed to listen to Sarah and Casey’s instructions to stay in the car and got captured by Fulcrum agents? Then pay a visit to TuneFind, which catalogs the songs used in recent TV shows and new movies. If the song is available on iTunes, the site will direct you there to buy it.

If it’s an older song that’s lodged in your brain, type whatever you remember of the lyrics into Lyrster, a lyrics search engine that indexes more than 350 lyric-hunting sites in English and French. Some of the sites also lead to audio or video clips of the song in question. (I personally was thrilled to find a cheesy video of “Disparue,” a French rock song from 1982 that I encountered during a high-school summer spent in France.)

If you’ve used the two sites above to successfully identify your song, head on over to just hear it, which searches the Web for audio and video of your chosen song. If you’re looking for multiple songs, you can drag each one to the right of the screen and create a playlist.

Just hear it has acquired all the appropriate licenses to ensure that artists receive royalties for their work when you stream their songs; that means you can root out that earworm and feel virtuous at the same time. The site is currently in private beta; you need an invitation to gain membership privileges that allow you to save playlists between visits. However, you can e-mail them and request one.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Find your own "eureka!" sites using SweetSearch.

How Do I Know If I Have Swine Flu?

Photo: Ryan Remiorz/AP

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a global panic, er, we mean pandemic, called swine flu. Or, at least it was called swine flu until the name was changed to protect the innocent. (Pigs, that is.) It’s now going by the clunky but nonoffensive title of influenza A (H1N1). Thankfully, we’re all clear on one fact: You can’t get swine flu from eating pork.

Unfortunately, when people start to panic, facts are hard to come by. On Twitter, which has been heralded as a hub for so-called citizen journalists, not every post tagged “#swineflu” contained information that was accurate, or even worth reading. People using the Twitter search engine to find answers may not have been employing the soundest judgment.

But even the professional media was responsible for creating a bit of a scare. As one Huffington Post blogger observed, a few headlines reading “Death Toll Rising” can lead the innocent news consumer to feel like “there’s a plague on.”

And while there have been comparisons to the flu epidemic of 1918, suggesting that influenza A might be the next Spanish influenza, we won’t help ourselves by giving in to hysteria. Still, a trait shared by the two viruses is that they start out mild. Spanish influenza eventually got worse, and influenza A has that potential.

In short: We can’t stop paying attention. Somewhere in between panic and ignorance is a happy medium.

That’s why we decided to find five sites with reliable, accurate and comprehensive information about swine flu. Get all your questions answered about how the disease started, why it’s a concern, what the symptoms are and how swine flu affects travel. The only thing the article won’t tell you is where you can buy a surgical mask.

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Social Bookmarking at its Most Fun

The second generation of social bookmarking sites is attempting to take the concept of grabbing a link and turning it into something visually appealing, addictive and all-encompassing. While many people swear by the comparatively old-school Delicious and Digg, there is room in these people’s lives—and yours—for other sites.

Current is technically a user-powered cable television station founded by Al Gore, but it also happens to be a social bookmarking Web site and hub for the station where you can watch video, read news items and comment and vote articles up or down, as well as submit your own. The focus, generally speaking, is on issues of public interest and issues that will pique your interest.

We Heart It calls itself a “visual bookmark for everyone.” Users have an eye for elegant imagery on the Web, whether it’s a photograph in a field, the interior of a house, a cute animal or a piece of clothing. Submissions are presented as squares and users can “heart” the selections they fancy and “explore more” to see similar items. (Warning: some items may be considered unsafe for work).

BuzzFeed is a time-bending portal to amusing, gross, and strange (did I say amusing?) items discovered on the Web. BuzzFeed has a staff of curators, but also invites user submissions. Each item comes with a photo or video, a link, user responses and other links on that topic. But you’ll likely never leave the site, so it doesn’t really matter.

Twine claims that it “Understands Your Interests,” and this is certainly an inviting proposition. Test it out by joining communities within the site, such as “Financial and Economic Global Crisis” or “Politics,” browsing the links others have posted and posting your own. You can bookmark items, share them and comment on them, and Twine will recommend items it thinks you’ll like.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Sweet Sites | Don't Get Fooled Again: Know Fact from Fiction

Know how to tell truth from fiction with help from these three Web sites.
 
Keep your e-mail inbox free of viruses, scams and hoaxes with help from Purportal.com, "debunking bunk since 2001." The site allows you to search various reputable databases and sites that collect information about urban legends, sneaky ways of parting you from your money and various bits of code you just don't want on your computer.  Sources include Snopes, Symantec and Fraud Watch International.
 
Continue on the factual path with Scirus, a search engine for scientific information that indexes journals, scientists' personal pages and coursework. A sister site, SciTopics, offers "research summaries" on a variety of different subjects in the sciences and the humanities, such as chemistry, environmental science and philosophy.
 
Librarians built Infomine, a collection of databases, electronic journals, books and other resources for university-level students and staff. It includes links to both paid and free content, and offers bibliographic information about each site.

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

If you like this newsletter, sign up for our weekly dose of travel insights or our weekly education-themed picks here.

Who Wants to Be an Internet Expert?

Back in the olden days, people talked about the list of books they wanted to read but would probably never get to. Although the lists might have been long, they may have been more manageable than we realized. With the Web, we’re getting a seemingly infinite number of articles thrown at us every minute. It’s hard to make a reading list—never mind get through it.

Fortunately, findingDulcinea, your friendly, neighborhood Internet librarian, has a solution: Our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters. Or, as we like to think of them: Expertise in Your Inbox.

* The Daily Dulcinea: A dose of knowledge spotlighting a notable biography or historical event. On Saturday, we'll send you "5 Must-Reads You May Have Missed" during the week.
* Weekly Travel Newsletter: a virtual tour of under-the-radar vacation destinations.
* Weekly Education Newsletter: a curation of Web sites and tools that aim to empower teachers, librarians, parents and students.
* Sweet Sites: a weekly e-mail of Web sites that will aid your research, up your Internet savvy and expand your mind.

Sign up here, now!

Your desire to become an Internet expert is probably reason enough for you to sign up for one or all of these newsletters. But if you need more incentive, we've created a list of reasons:

1. Our "On This Day" and Happy Birthday e-mails are guaranteed to tell you the correct date, every day.
2. There's no point to that new smartphone if no one is e-mailing you, right? We'll e-mail you. We promise.
3. We are more consistent/less demanding than the boy/girl/client/gig you wish was e-mailing you.
4. Getting our travel newsletter is like traveling, except you can bring more than 3 fluid ounces with you when you read it.
5. Our weekly "Sweet Sites" e-mail is not as bad for your teeth as other sweets. Nor will it get your keyboard sticky when you surf the Web.
6. If you lie and say you found one of our Sweet Sites yourself, we'll never find out.
7. Visit our Religion and Spirituality Web Guide to deal with the guilt you'll feel about stealing credit for our awesome work.

Culinary Travel Sites for Study Abroad Students

Eating al fresco in Barcelona

Cooking and eating with the locals offers a surefire cultural immersion for students studying abroad. Even without enrolling in a strictly culinary program, students can experience the deeply embedded cultural features intrinsic to native foods, simply by doing as the locals do.

Brave New Traveler’s Ross Lee Tabak has excellent advice for those longing to tuck into a legit local meal, including shopping at the grocery store instead of always eating out, not being afraid to eat alone, trying everything once and walking around during mealtimes to ask locals for their recommendations.

For students who want a more formal and structured culinary education experience abroad, there are plenty of programs to choose from. Try Study Abroad Links, which has a thorough directory of culinary study abroad programs in Argentina, Canada, France, Italy, South Africa, Spain, Thailand and the United States. Or visit the Study Abroad Directory from GoAbroad.com, which lists about 100 different culinary arts programs for students around the world (just highlight “Culinary Arts” in the subject section of the search box).

Finally, visit our "6 Sites for Study Abroad Programs," for more sites to help you plan an educational immersion, or our Food Web Guide to help you indulge in all things culinary on the Web.

Sarah Amandolare
Senior Writer

April Fool's Day Jokes that Could Have Saved You Time and Money

 Just because yesterday was April Fool’s Day doesn’t mean you had any less work to do. In fact, maybe you were so busy that you jumped at the chance to enlist Gmail’s help in responding to the numerous e-mails you receive every day. With the newly released Autopilot, Gmail takes its service one step further. Now, Google’s Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed Intelligence Entity—otherwise known as CADIE—will assess the tone of the e-mails you receive and respond to them for you.

With the time you save by letting CADIE respond to your e-mails, you’ll have plenty of time to download music. The owners of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay have made it easier for you, too, by selling their site to Warner Bros.

When they faced their last round of legal charges in Sweden this February, they argued that even if they got sued, they wouldn’t have money to pay the damages. Now they’ve got the cash (around $13 billion) and Warner Bros. can deal with the legal complications.

You’ll also save time now that The Guardian plans to eliminate its print version and switch entirely to the Twitter platform. After all, you knew perfectly well that any story worth telling could be expressed in 140 characters or less. Thank goodness that dinosaur newspaper finally caught on after 188 years!

So you’ve streamlined your day. It’s time to sit back, relax and have a good hearty laugh over all the April Fools’ Day jokes that exploded on the Web. Because as it turns out, no matter what is bothering you or causing you stress, laughter is the best medicine. No…really! It’s not a joke!

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Sweet Sites | Eye on the Sky (and Under Ground): Sites on Natural Disasters and Emergency Preparedness

Alaska's Mt. Redoubt (Photo: GeoEye Satellite Image/AP)

A few short weeks ago, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana appeared on national television and decried the waste of spending money to observe volcanoes in Alaska. Then Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt erupted. Several times. The current flood threat in North Dakota and Minnesota make it clear that keeping an eye on the situation is vital to preserving people and property from danger and damage.

Floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes: Who can keep up? Well, research centers across the globe are dedicated to that very purpose, and many of them provide up-to-date information on disaster news, prevention and relief.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center provides an animated map of severe weather patterns moving across the United States, storm reports and FAQs about tornadoes and derechos (windstorms).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Emergency Preparedness and Response helps you lay out a general disaster plan for you and your family, and provides preparedness steps for specific (and currently occurring) hazards, such as volcanic eruptions, floods and blizzards.

The University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center doesn’t appear to have much useful information on its own site, but it does link to several other disaster research centers across the globe, including the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre (ABUHRC), “Europe's leading multidisciplinary academic hazard research centre,” and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center.

Learn more about one of nature's most dramatic events in our feature article "Nature Wages War: Volcanoes."

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Spanish-Language News Sources on the Web

To live as a Spanish speaker in the United States means to live in a bilingual environment in which both Spanish and English play a role in everyday experiences and interactions. Compared to the many English news sources available for readers in the U.S., both online and in print, Spanish-only resources are limited. EncontrandoDulcinea is not only a news source in Spanish—it’s a bilingual tool, a way to guide Spanish-speaking readers to the best English resources the Web has to offer.

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, offers a comprehensive version of its original English site in Spanish that focuses on news from the United States and Latin America. The site also includes content on investments, people and lifestyle geared toward a Latino audience.

Similarly, El Nuevo Herald is a Miami-based newspaper that offers news entirely in Spanish on topics that would be of interest to the Latino community. The editorial tone of El Nuevo Herald is lighter than that of the Wall Street Journal, and includes news on entertainment, fashion, health and sports along with stories about politics and the economy.

The New York City newspaper El Diario is another excellent Spanish news source that provides news stories from the U.S. and Latin America with a focus on the New York City area.

At the beginning of March, encontrandoDulcinea started publishing news stories aimed at the Spanish-speaking Latino community in the U.S. The site takes a unique bilingual approach to news, providing original narrative in Spanish and then guiding the reader to trusted news sources in English. In this way, encontrandoDulcinea aims to bridge the language gap, making it easier for the Spanish-speaking reader to access English news sources on the Web.

Anita Gutierrez-Folch
Senior Writer

Follow encontrandoDulcinea on Twitter!

Sweet Sites | Let's Get Visual: Find Great Images on the Web

Painter Ellsworth Kelly's "Color Panels for a Large Wall" at the National Gallery of Art, 2003. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

One reason the Web has become such an intrinsic part of our lives is that it is not simply a repository of text information. Many times, when you go online to search for something, it’s not words that you’re looking for. Here are three resources that can help you find images.

You can search all the holdings at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., pictured at left, at the museum’s Web site. The collection includes both centuries-old and contemporary European and American paintings, photographs, sculptures and examples of the decorative arts.

A University of Washington database provides images of cities and buildings from various time periods. Search by country, city, style, title, architect, date of construction and other criteria.

In collaboration with various museums, Tufts University offers the Art & Archeology Browser, a database of images and descriptions of coins, vases, sculptures, archeological sites, gems, and buildings.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Find your own "eureka" sites with SweetSearch.

Sweet Sites | Don't Know Much about U.S. History? The Government Does

If you're looking for information about American history, you might want to start with resources sponsored by the U.S. government.

The official FBI site has quite a lot of information on American crime. The history section tells the story of the FBI and its role during major periods of American history, from its origins in the early 20th century to today. The headline archives index allows you to browse articles by type of crime.

For more American history resources, consult the National Archives Web site; you can browse the site by topic.

If the government doesn't give you what you want, visit The Internet Public Library; it's got tons of useful links, which can be browsed by subject and subcategories within each subject.

"Women Who Dared" is our tribute to the women in American history. Learn about a month's worth of pioneering American women, including Melissa Etheridge, Marie Curie and Eleanor Roosevelt, in this special Women's History Month section.

Learn about more key players in U.S. history, including the Vikings, Columbus, and Native Americans using the sites in our U.S. History Web Guide.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor
findingDulcinea

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Good News to the Rescue!

Think of the word “news” and you inevitably think of tickers streaming across the television screen, aircraft circling over war zones and anchors looking stern (except if they’re Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert).

There’s a market for good news, especially during a recession. In fact, we just began a daily column of good news called “Chin Up in the Downswing,” written by our finance writer Anne Szustek. Anne is also creating a Twitter account devoted to good economic news. (Read our second, March 12 installment of the series, "Chin Up in the Downswing: Buckle, American Public Education, Short Selling Uptick Rule.")

Sites like the Good News Network and Happy News run the gamut from happy health news to happy financial news. Happy News also has videos and reviews of so-called happy products. Another such site is Gimundo, which also has videos and hopeful stories from around the globe.

The teen volunteering site Do Something has a blog, Celebs Gone Good, that spotlights celebrities who are volunteers or otherwise active in philanthropy.

Netherlands-based Ode Magazine is a proponent of good news (get their news in a nutshell by following them on Twitter). As co-founder and editor-in-chief Jurriaan Kamp explains the effect of the mainstream media, “We only learn about whatever goes wrong. And then we are supposed to believe that that is our reality.”

You can always spread your own positive message through volunteering, which this news story tells us has not been dwindling during the recession. Peruse our Web Guide to Philanthropy and Nonprofits to find more ways to create your own good news.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Introducing encontrandoDulcinea, a Cultural News Source for the Hispanic Reader

encontrandoDulcinea, findingDulcinea’s sister site in Spanish, has been live on the Web for about six months, steadily growing in the wealth and variety of its content and expanding its reach with a host of relevant and educational news and features.

Adding to our selection of more than 60 research guides, encontrandoDulcinea now includes profiles, interviews and an educational series.

The material featured in encontrandoDulcinea is intended for bilingual readers who prefer to have Web content delivered to them in Spanish but who understand English well enough to make use of the original recommended sites. The site covers topics and materials that are educational and particularly relevant for the Spanish-speaking community of the United States.

Given the exponential growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S., as evidenced in this recent article by the Associated Press, bridging the language barrier online is more important than ever.

The content provided by encontrandoDulcinea helps to reach out to those who aren’t entirely fluent or highly proficient in English. By creating a bridge over the language barrier, encontrandoDulcinea makes educational and enriching material available to readers who feel more comfortable approaching it in Spanish.

Anita Gutierrez-Folch
Senior Writer
encontrandoDulcinea

Keep up to date with encontrandoDulcinea by following us on Twitter!

Sweet Sites | Magazines, Journal Articles, Books and More

Nothing beats a library, but know before you go using the online catalog WorldCat.

Thanks to my last Sweet Sites entry, "Global Resources for Searching Local News," you should now have just about all the newspaper access that you’ll ever need. Here are three more sites that can help temporarily quench your thirst for reading material.

Search for magazine articles that are available for free online via MagPortal. A page on the site lists the magazines available and what articles have been indexed.

If you’ve just got to keep up with the latest scientific discoveries, you’ll find every research paper published in a NIH-funded journal at PubMed Central.

Why wait to go the library to see if they have what you want on the shelf? Visit WorldCat and get information about books, CDs, videos, news articles and digital collections held by more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

You can get this blog entry delivered to your e-mail inbox every Monday with our Sweet Sites newsletter. Sign up for it here!

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Get Overwhelmed by the Internet—in a Good Way

The Internet can be hard to tackle. With the advent of blogs, blog databases like Technorati, RSS feeds and now Twitter, it’s easy to feel swept up in a sea of links. But if you tackle the waves effectively, that information can actually be, well, informative. Here are a few of our favorite inlets.

Popurls, pictured above, is “the original buzz aggregator.” Founder Thomas Marban created a list of curated links from a series of popular Web portals, like Google News, Flickr, Topix and Gawker, and gave each portal its own list. The result is a soothing black background filled with light blue links (you can also tweak the design in the tab at the top of the homepage). Sites are being added to the database all the time, making Popurls a handy index for all manner of Web user.

Alltop was inspired by Popurls. Founder and Web guru Guy Kawasaki took the Popurls model and ran with it, creating categorical indices of the Web that point users to the best URLs on hundreds of topics, specific and general.

Twitter is becoming the preferred way to share links with friends, colleagues and strangers—even celebrities! Fire off a sentence at a time to a growing network of Internet users, and connect with others like you with Twitter-centric services like Twitter Groups.

Bloglovin, mentioned in our previous post about New York Fashion Week, is a growing network of blogs that allows you to track favorite blogs, bookmark posts to read later and add your own blog to the database.

Diigo is the crème de la crème of bookmarking. Diigo’s vast network of users can share and tag links, start groups, highlight parts of articles and attach sticky notes to Web pages using the site’s sophisticated technology. It’s a great place to do Web research, as the bookmarked pages have become a large, annotated database.

For RSS feeds, customer satisfaction for Google Reader is high. Netvibes comes a close second. It has an excerpt option and a "view website" option that lets you see the full page of the feed you're viewing within Netvibes. It also has nifty color coding and a widget-like appearance.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Learn more about RSS feeds, aggregators, blogs, wikis and more in our Web Guide Web Technology: A Primer.

Sweet Sites | Global Resources for Searching Local News

As I promised in my last blog entry, I’m sharing sites with everyone who’d like to move beyond simply plugging a bunch of search terms into Google and hoping for the best. Today, my focus is the news.

Often, the best way to learn about a news story is to find out where it happened, and look it up in that location’s local paper. When you’re tired of The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times, here are some resources that can help you find the local color you crave.

NewsVoyager allows you to search for newspaper home pages by state and country.

Paperboy provides access to more than 6,300 newspapers as well as several magazines; see what’s available in each state and country, browse newspaper front pages or find magazines by subject.

While many daily newspapers allow you to read their current edition for free, most charge for a look at their archives. The Special Libraries Association News Division lists which newspapers have online archives, how far back they go and how much you can expect to pay per article (in some cases, nothing at all).

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Find more "eureka" search results with our search engine, SweetSearch.

Inspiring Kids and Teens to Become Volunteers

A teenage volunteer helps a special needs child in the program  Friendship Circle. (Rich Schultz/AP)

There’s a good reason why colleges like applicants with community service under their belts. Volunteerism is an often life-changing experience that helps young people mature, work with people they might never normally meet, see new places and respond to a higher calling, as President Obama implored us all to do during a commencement address to Wesleyan University’s Class of 2008. Below are sites that can help kids, teenagers and young adults shape their adult selves through volunteering.

DoSomething.org is a nonprofit organization that harnesses the Web to bring young people a large, searchable database of volunteer opportunities and funding sources to get their ideas off the ground. The organization gives $500 grants to motivated teens and young adults, and awards $100,000 to the best volunteer project proposal of the year.

Idealist.org’s Kids & Teens section is “an essential resource for kids who want to start a project of their own, or connect with youth organizations already involved in human rights, the environment or the arts,” says Senior Writer Sarah Amandolare in the article “Volunteer Opportunities for Kids.” The article lists a few more sites like Idealist.org and DoSomething.org.

Our Alternative Spring Break Web Guide points out that local or remote volunteer opportunities can be an enlightening way for a student to spend a couple of weeks. Find inspiration and help planning your volunteer trip in this guide.

One such travel volunteerism site is Global Works, which integrates service work with cultural immersion to give teens an alternative to more typical summer activities. Language immersion trips are also available, as are custom-designed trips for groups of 14 or more.

Learn more in the Philanthropy and Nonprofits Web Guide.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Web Sites Every College Applicant Should Know About

When I was about to head off to college in 2001, I knew of only a handful of Web sites that could help me prepare for the next four years. Today there are many more. In researching an article called “8 Sites for College Dorm Survival” for findingDulcinea, I came across several sites that can help all the Web 2.0 generation kids heading to school in the next year or two.

Unigo promises to make the college decision-making process easier for high school students. With its staff and user-submitted reviews of several hundred top U.S. colleges and universities, the site is poised to be one of the most content-rich college review sites on the Web. Accompanying the reviews are on-campus videos featuring interviews and tours, and helpful articles on all things collegiate.

EDUInReview  collects valuable educational resources from around the Web, publishes articles and reviews and otherwise helps students get their bearings on loans, scholarships and decision-making.

DormDelicious is a blog with a variety of articles on improving one’s quality of dorm life. Get inspired to decorate, learn to love your roommate(s), browse pictures of fellow co-eds’ rooms and watch videos that peer into dorm culture around the country.

Surviving College Life is another blog with sage advice from Jamie, a recent UC San Diego college grad, about all aspects of college living. Jamie links to recommended products, blogs and sites around the Web, and boasts quality original writing that will comfort many.

High school juniors and seniors will appreciate our Web Guide to Applying to College, which has sections on entrance exams, applications and entrance essays, choosing a college and steps in the application process.

Those about to start their journey should check out the Web Guide to College Life, with a few of the sites mentioned above and many more on dorm life, health and nutrition, studying and staying organized, and more.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Sweet Sites | January 30, 2009

A key mission of findingDulcinea is to help people search better. Thanks to our new search engine, SweetSearch, that mission has become easier than ever before, because it only includes sites that we at findingDulcinea have vetted. In this new weekly series, which will also appear as a newsletter starting next week, I'll bring you some "eureka" finds from around the Web.

Both Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times and I love TED.com. The site offers high-quality videos of absolutely fascinating talks by innovators in technology, science, politics and the arts.

I also find all kinds of great stuff on university library Web sites. For example, the University of Pennsylvania Library offers an extensive list of useful research links on a HUGE variety of topics. And many universities, such as Harvard, are digitizing at least part of their collections and making them available on the Web.

A link I found at the Harvard site led me to Old Bailey Online. The site offers 250 years' worth of bizarrely fascinating information about the proceedings of London's chief criminal court, as well as tons of historical information about London society.

I love being an intrepid Internet explorer in search of buried Web treasure, and I promise to share what I find, instead of keeping it to myself.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Introducing SweetSearch, a More Selective Search Engine

Today, findingDulcinea launched a more selective search engine. Its name is SweetSearch, and it’s just what I’ve been waiting for.

SweetSearch gives me great search results right on the first page. I don’t have to waste time scrolling through a lot of junk returns to find what I really want. And it often gives me a “eureka” find—a site I never would have encountered using another search engine.

For students of any level, and for anyone doing research online, SweetSearch avoids the confusing and often unreliable listings that can appear high up on a typical search engine’s results page.

SweetSearch is the offshoot of three years of research by findingDulcinea’s staff—an ever-growing collection of tens of thousands of Web sites, all evaluated and approved for reliability and ease of use. FindingDulcinea’s researchers use multiple search engines and databases to uncover many sites that don't routinely appear in the search engines most people use (Google, Yahoo! and MSN).

With Google's Custom Search service as its foundation, SweetSearch indexes only those approved sites—the results are fine-tuned, focused and discriminating. Users find more of what they really want, and they get to it faster.

SweetSearch also includes a toggle option to view results from Google as a supplement to your search queries on SweetSearch.

Watch these videos produced by Senior Writer Rachel Balik, as she compares two searches conducted on SweetSearch and Google:

A comparison search of 'Gardasil'

A comparison search of 'Benjamin Franklin'

We'd love to get your feedback on SweetSearch. Try your own searches and let us know what you think by commenting below or by e-mailing sweetsearch (at) dulcineamedia (dot) com.

For more information on SweetSearch, read the press release.

Anne Kostick
Editor-in-Chief