Saturday Sips: I want answers!

On Saturdays, I share refreshment and insight—wisdom, information, encouragement—for your life.

Today I have seven nifty places to go on the web when you are shouting begging threatening saying: I want answers!

If you are ready to go in search of that elusive information, here’s the list:

1.  Top 10 search engines. Let’s begin by expanding the pool by which you search. Search engines are like grocery stores: While they all have products—results—what they offer can vary a lot. I am partial to Bing myself, but Google is my go-to site for satellite images. I encourage you to experiment with a couple next time you are searching to see which site consistently brings you what you want.

2.  Wolfram Alpha. I just love the name, but the website is equally nifty. Be sure to watch the intro video at the link.

I turn to How-To Geek to describe the site:

 It is  a“computational knowledge engine.” That makes it sound a bit scary, but it’s a great tool once you can wrap your head around it. Apple’s Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for 25% of its searches. You can leverage that magic and put Wolfram Alpha to work for you — the empty search box on its homepage holds endless possibilities.

Geek continues, suggesting 10 amazing uses, including nutrition information, complicated math (homework help, anyone?), and word trivia for my gaming friends. Business Insider also shares 32 tricks you can do with the site.

3.  Ask Meta. Their tagline is terrific: querying the hive mind. You can search the site for free and there are a multitude of interesting questions and answers from folks. For $5, you can join in the fun, asking and answering questions. Basically, Ask Meta provides a megaphone and a huge crowd to help answer your questions. Recently a woman used it to help solve a mystery that has plagued her family for over twenty years.  You can read the story here.

4.  GardenWeb Home Forums. This is the largest home and garden do it yourself forum on the web which you can search to your hearts content. To ask questions you must register, which is free. I have used this resource many times for help with our home search. We recently moved to a new area of the country—NH to TN—and there is so much about soil, weather, house construction, etc., that we don’t know. These forums have been very helpful in speeding up our learning curve and helping us make more well-informed decisions.

5.  Do it Yourself. As much as you love to do things yourselves, you don’t always know what you are doing, which can lead to visits to the emergency room, or calls to the contractor or plumber to fix what you’ve done. It’s ok to admit that, by the way. This DIY site hosts thousands of articles and videos to help you with a huge variety of projects. They also have forums you can join.

6.  Wayback Machine. Do you find yourself arguing about web trivia and not knowing how you can find the answer, or perhaps you need an old website for reference? Wayback Machine has an archive of almost 2 petabytes of data—sounds like food for itty bitty dogs, doesn’t it?—and it’s getting larger every month.  According to their site,  “the Internet Archive includes: texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.” You can get lost in here, trust me.

7.  Time and Date.  Yes, I admit, I get confused by time zones. I use this site so I don’t call my friends in the middle of the night, and to make sure I attend webinars at the right time. You can look up days and dates for any point in history—I’m a Tuesday child, full of grace, by the way —or create and print custom calendars.

There is your refreshment today. Go forth, and seek, my friend!

Question: What do you find most useful when you are looking for information?

Top Photo: Sara Nel. Cropped, text added.

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