Reference

Sites

Google

My search engine of choice. Google searches the entire World Wide Web, like Alta Vista, but ranks the sites it finds using a special measure of importance: how often the sites are linked to by other sites. If there's a site that's the recognized authority on your topic of interest, Google will find it for you.

Google Groups

The most complete Usenet archives anywhere.

Alta Vista

Alta Vista will search almost the entire World Wide Web for any search string you can think of, and returns the results sorted by relevance. Because Alta Vista's notion of relevance and mine are rather different scanning the results is often like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it is still a useful tool, especially if you are desperate.

Yahoo

This used to be my search index of choice. Then I found Google.

Internet FAQ Consortium

On-line compendium of USENET newsgroup FAQs. It used to be that every topic of interest to 'net users had its own USENET newsgroup, and that the condensed wisdom of each newsgroup was compiled into a Frequently-Asked-Questions file. USENET FAQs were thus one of the best resources on the 'net. With the advent of the World Wide Web, this is no longer necessarily the case...but there is still plenty of good information here.