EXPERT INFORMATION
about.com
Five stars You want a video tutorial on how to improve your golf swing or learn to break-dance. Well, search engines are clever, no doubt about it, but they are not necessarily the best way to find needles in the digital haystack. About.com is. Founded in 1997 and accessed by an estimated one in five net surfers, this fount of wisdom contains hundreds of topic-specific subsites, covering everything from attention-deficit disorder to zoology, each hosted by an expert editor. These specialists — among them the fabulously named Phylameana lila Désy (holistic healing) and the rather less flaky Courtney Kraft (colds and flu) — maintain well-edited portals that contain practical advice, helpful links and plenty of video clips. About.com’s strength is its breadth: tips for travelling in Scotland, for instance, sit alongside suggestions about where to find classical-music radio online. It calls itself the Human Internet, and it should definitely be part of your searching strategy.
CRICKET’S BIG HIT
www.cricinfo.com
Four stars
From women’s internationals to Test matches, the hugely comprehensive Cricinfo offers live scores for “almost every cricket match of any consequence”, as well as a radio show and audio coverage of prominent series. If only it showed more video. Super as these features are, however, they are a molehill compared with the mountain of statistics here, courtesy of the Wisden Almanack — cricket’s ultimate record book. The Cricinfo database is so all-encompassing that any paper version would be unusable, but with clever and flexible search tools, this incredible volume of facts can be sifted with ease. In the second innings of victorious home Ashes Tests, Mike Atherton averaged 53.5, WG Grace 36 and Len Hutton a feeble 17. So, Atherton was the best of them: fact. And when 13-year-old AEJ Collins scored 628 not out in a house match at Clifton College in 1899, still the highest score in cricket, he was dropped on 50, 100, 140, 556, 605 and 619. The definitive single-subject encyclopedia.
VIRTUAL SECOND OPINION
www.merckhomeedition.com
Four stars
Here’s a serious innovation, thanks to broadband: anatomical animations that illustrate how the oesophagus works and video clips of ultrasound scanning that should put patients’ minds at ease. The Merck is a venerable American medical reference book and aide-mémoire, written in plain language and freely available online. Some doctors might fear it is a hypochondriac’s charter, but far from it. This sensible, well-indexed, easy-to-use guide to basic healthcare takes visitors through aspects of their condition and treatment that they might not have understood in the doctor’s surgery; there is also advice on how best to communicate with healthcare professionals. This is a comprehensive source of information that helps surfers diagnose ailments, from altitude sickness to heatstroke, advises on first aid and discusses issues such as exercise programmes. And, if you are a hypochondriac, it is the best thing since sliced bread.
CREATIVE WORDPLAY
www.visualthesaurus.com
Four stars
The web is the ideal medium to illustrate a thesaurus. Most reference sites exploit the internet to catalogue a sizeable amount of data in a manageable manner; Visual Thesaurus takes a much smaller body of information (145,000 words) and presents it in a dynamic new way. Search for a word, such as “jog”, and it quickly appears at the centre of a spider diagram linking it to related words — solid lines indicate synonyms and dotted ones describe other relationships, jog being “a type of” exercise, for example. The handsome, interactive word map suggests alternative spellings for the unsure and brings up meanings in pop-up boxes. Parents can choose to filter out the rude words they scoured thesauruses to find when they were children, and there is an audio option, so you can hear how to articulate your new-found vocabulary. Subscription to the online version costs £1.60 per month: not a crippling expense.
ECLECTIC PORTAL
www.skepdic.com
Three stars
The Skeptic’s Dictionary is a compendium of detailed information about oft-repeated hoaxes, legends and quackery. Created in 1994 by Robert Todd Carroll, a university lecturer, as an adjunct to his classes on critical thinking, it has grown into a highly organised, common-sense trove. It explains and questions such disparate subjects as Congolese dinosaurs, kabbalah and macrobiotics. It has sections on rhetorical tricks (fakes love ad-hoc hypotheses, such as “my ESP isn’t working because of your bad vibes”) and logical misconceptions (“spooky” coincidences are more or less inevitable), making it an essential antidote to credulity and sloppy thinking. Any time you want a measured explanation of a left-field subject, or hear something that sounds too good to be true, this is your first port of call. A rare site that does not suffer from a lack of the audiovisual.
RATIONALIST BIBLE
www.refdesk.com
Three stars
Refdesk’s claim to be the web’s “single best source for facts” is hard to dispute. It offers links to Google, Yahoo! and MSN searches, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary and thesaurus, constantly up-dated news headlines and a bewildering array of maps, advice, style guides, national factoids, atomic clocks, single-subject info sites and ephemera, all vetted for authoritativeness and ease of use. Apart from the brilliant simplicity of a portal that combines the web’s searchability and cross-referencing, the eclectic links — some to audio and video — make it an addictive counterpart to Schott’s Miscellany. Did you know that rebut means to argue against, while refute means to prove wrong? Or that fruit juice is one of the worst clothes stains, but with dishwashing liquid, vinegar and a lemon, you have a chance? Or where the stars were the day you were born? Loses a star for American focus.
CYBER SYMPOSIUM
www.wikipedia.org
Three stars
Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia where visitors can create and edit contributions, though it badly needs rich media to prove itself as 21st-century technology. Containing 1.3m well-linked entries in 100 languages, it has advanced from a ragtag collection of shreds and patches to the place to visit for long, authoritative accounts of topics that other dictionaries couldn’t give space to — you can learn that there have been two documented incidents of exploding whales, and that Sealand is a micro-nation six miles off the coast of Suffolk. The authority of some entries is questionable, although corruptions and factual inaccuracies are generally fixed by the largely scrupulous body of visitors. A central board also adjudicates on suspect additions, and Wikipedia’s cut and thrust has produced interesting consensus on contentious issues such as the sovereignty of Cornwall. Not the finished article, but a great starting point.
