Online Resources for Writers

GENERAL TOOLS
Quick answers from Answers.com:  Take a moment to download the Answers.com application. Then ALT click on any word, in any document, and it automatically defines the word.
Free Dictionary:  Another free dictionary (from Merriam-Webster), but without the cool Alt click function.
Free Encyclopedia:  Wikipedia is the best free encyclopedia on the Web. It’s a WIKI, which means that the worldwide community of Web users add to it every day.
Free Maps:  Mapquest:  The old favorite for maps.
Literary Resources:  A great location for several online resources, including Bartlett’s Quotations, and Roget’s Thesaurus … and it’s all free!
Holidays:  Forget when Thanksgiving is?  This site lists all major holidays … so you can send those online cards to your friends!
Time around the World:  Tired of waking up your Australian friends in the middle of the night?  Get the time in every part of the world … except cyberspace, of course!

SEARCH TOOLS
Mainstream Search
Google (The most accurate search engine); Yahoo! (Not bad); and MSN (If you want to make Gates richer).
More Esoteric Search
Ask (what happened to Gieves?); Dogpile (A “funnel” of multiple search sites. Saves you from going directly to 4 search engines seperately); Altavista (One of the original search engines, and still pretty good); High Beam (More than search, they say: It’s research. Good.); Clusty (One of my personal favorites; a search engine that provides automatic clustering of topics … to make your search easier.  Often far more useful than Google!).
Social Bookmarking Search (Communities)
Eurekster (Search powered by community members; share bookmarks and leverage the searches that others have already done!); Blinklist (Another social bookmarking/search engine; purchased by Google, and therefore billed as a “personal discovery engine”); kaboodle (Another social bookmarking/search engine, primarily useful for product search/shopping); and, of course, del.icio.us (The granddaddy of social bookmarking/search engines, based on user-defined/user-generated tags - AKA categories).
Blog Search
Technorati (A great blog search tool);  Blog Search Engine (Decent blog search engine - the name says everything); Blogdigger (Good blog search engine); Blog Pulse (A very cool search engine from Nielsen SearchMetrics, and a personal favorite); Blog Search (from Blogger); the Google blog search engine; and the Yahoo! blog search engine.
RSS Feeds
Feedster (A search engine for RSS feeds - news, blogs and podcasts).

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