The World Wide Web, the Internet, the web, the net—whatever you call it, it’s the single largest source of any and all information ever. With a search engine aid, you’re more likely to find the information you’re looking for—though not always.
Rankings, polls, and surveys with information about popular web sites can be beneficial to people who don’t want to rely on the search engines to find the best places to surf the web. I’ve taken the best Internet haunts I could gather and organized them into five categories for your convenience. So open your favorite web browser, and start surfing.
Entertainment/Family/Kids
• www.imdb.com. The Internet Movie Database is the largest and most complete movie web site. If you want the actors’ names, reviews, release date, producer, director, or writer, bookmark this site.
• www.familysafemedia.com. Family Safe Media is dedicated to selling child safe movies, controllers, and hardware that filter profanity, promiscuity, and violence.
• www.familyeducation.com. Family Education is where you can find developmental, school, homework help, parenting tips, and expert advice to help your children.
• www.coolmath.com. Parents and kids will love this dynamic educational site. Everybody needs a little help in math now and then.
• www.yahooligans.com. Yahoo turns out a wonderful site—a large-scale entertaining and fun place with science, geography, and other diverse areas of facts.
Computer Protection
• www.prevx.com. Prevx produces personal computer protection software that protects against all forms of viruses, adware, spyware, and hackers.
• www.pctools.com. PC Tools offers products to stop viruses, spam, and spyware, as well as protect your privacy, recover files, and windows registry cleaner to keep your computer running at peak performance.
• www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware. Ad-Aware provides advanced protection from data-mining, aggressive advertising, Trojans, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, and tracking components.
• www.spybot.info. According to PC World, PCMag.com, and Download.com, Spybot Search & Destroy is the best spyware protection product available.
• www.zonelabs.com. Zone Labs creates firewall, anti-spyware, antivirus, privacy protection, e-mail security, web content filtering, anti-phishing, and spam blocking computer protection software.
Satellite Imagery
• www.nasa.gov/multimedia. NASA has challenged the boundaries of web sites with their information resources. Parents, kids, teachers, and mentors will enjoy the incredible imagery.
• www.earth.google.com. A 3D interface to our planet with great driving and travel directions. You may remember this site as www.keyhole.com.
• www.terraserver.com. Excellent quality aerial, satellite, and topographical photos and maps. Cool features that keep you more than intrigued.
• www.globexplorer.com. 2D and 3D viewers with worldwide imagery data for fun or business level applications. Since 1999, the world’s largest commercial collection of aerial and satellite images.
• www.landvoyage.com. Unlimited mapping solutions for real estate, agriculture, education, hiking/camping, and much more. Membership benefits of Landvoyage have a lot more depth.
News
• www.cnn.com. One of America’s leaders in media has a great site that covers much more than instant news. Politics, law, technology, health, and weather are just a few. CNN Pipeline is new product you can try out.
• www.msnbc.com. The NBC folks have programming like Dateline, Meet the Press, and The Today Show highlighted on this site, along with up-to-the minute news. Local news and weather are available.
• www.usatoday.com. Life issues, money, sports, and news are just a few of the great features USA Today gives its web readers. Their Marketplace section is interesting and well thought out.
• www.bbc.com. With both an international and UK version of this news media outlet, you may choose your preference. The radio world services is an interesting extension of this site.
• www.wired.com. A very diverse science and technological news web site that really grabs your attention with its unique style of focus. Culture clashes and political spins have a high level of independence with Wired.
Lighter News
• www.thesmokinggun.com. The Smoking Gun brings 100 percent guaranteed authentic exclusive documents and stories relating to current news events that can’t be found anywhere else on the Internet.
• www.theonion.com. The Onion is a 15-year-old news organization that fearlessly reports with scathing commentary on world events, human behavior, and journalistic convention.
• www.davesdaily.com. Dave’s Daily News is the place for funny, strange, and bizarre news stories and pictures from around the world.
• www.darwinawards.com. The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally kill themselves in really stupid ways.
• www.commondreams.org. Common Dreams is a national non-profit citizens’ organization working to bring progressive Americans together to promote progressive visions for America’s future. IBI
