Telephones--The Early Years

A small but impressive collection of early telephones can be viewed at the Cyber Telephone Museum. The telephones displayed are from 1876-1915. There are brief explanations and descriptions. Interesting, if limited, site.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About ***

City-Data is the place you want to go if you want information about a particular town or city in the United States. Not only does this site provide basic population and location information about the city of your choice but it also provides crime statistics, demographics, city government administrative budgets, average travel time to work, graphs of annual weather conditions, and photos of the city. I checked this out with 3 different cities, one with a population over one million, the second had a population around 60,000 and a small town with a population under 15,000. They all contained great info.

When loading the information on the city, don't be turned off when the Google ads pop up first with info about companies providing demographic information. The good stuff comes shortly after the ads and it is free.

It's In the Book

Search Inside the Book is from Amazon.com and allows the researcher to find books in the normal fashion but also does a check of untold numbers of books to search for keywords that may appear inside the book. I'm not certain whether they are performing these searches on new, copyrighted materials or only public domain books. If the former, how come they get away with it and Google doesn't?

Shop Till You Drop

With the holiday season upon us retailers are advertising all the usual wears at the usual holiday inflated "special" prices. But where do you go to find that special gift? The one that isn't carried at every department store. Try Become. Become is a shopping search engine. It doesn't just help find the product but also buying guides, reviews, articles, specifications and more.

Searching for the Spoken Word

Most Internet surfers know how to use one search engine or another for finding printed references for a particular topic. They may even be able to find appropriately titled images, sounds or video files. These media searches usually require that the appropriate search phrase is located somewhere on the same page or within the media filename. Podscope actually searches audio and video files and "listens" for the search term. So even if the key phrase does not appear on the printed web page, it will be found in the audio or video file if it is spoken.

CAUTION: Just like text searching, this kind of searching may lead to many false hits when the search term is only mentioned as a casual reference within an audio file. Example: You are looking for info about martial arts and you find an audio interview with a rocket scientist who happens to mention in passing that he likes martial arts movies. The rest of the audio may have nothing to do with your search topic.