JNet's Top Picks of 2003

Here is a random selection of some of the best, most topical or just plain fun sites for journalists.

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• Google News Alert Google has just added an excellent feature to its already excellent Google news search site. Now you can set an endless number of free news alerts - once a day or as they happen -- for any words that appear in newspapers and media outlets. Using the advanced search function, you can even narrow your alerts to a single publication. Be sure to read the tips to find out how this is done. For more Google search tools, see JNet's Best Search Page
  
  

• GoogleAlert Tired of always returning to Google to check on the same topic over and over again? Worried about missing a new web page on a breaking story? This free and ingenious device runs daily Google searches for you and emails you whenever new results appear. You can run up to five separate searches. For more Google search tools, see JNet's Best Search Page
  
  
  
• Google Toolbar Get the best of Google right on your browser's toolbar. Install this free tool from Google -- you must have Internet Explorer running -- and get instant access to the Google search engine,Google's Advanced Search, Google News, and Google Groups. For more toolbars, see JNet's Search Tools Page
  
  

•   The Internet Archive Toolbar    The Wayback Machine was always a little known but delightful archive tool -- making it possible to surf more than 10 billion pages stored in the Internet Archive. You can find years-old versions of web pages -- it's hit or miss, but still always useful to see what some official site was saying before or after a key event. Now you can put the Wayback Machine right in your browser by simply dragging this new toolbar link to your browser toolbar. Then when you visit a page that you want to find an old version of, just click and you will be transported to any historic versions at the Wayback Machine. For more archive tools, see JNet' Find Archives Page

•  Vivisimo This was the search engine that first introduced clustering -- instead of just giving you one long list, Vivisimo groups your search results by themes and suggests new avenues of research. Now it has expanded its resources. For news, Vivisimo has added the CBC, PBS and other outlets to an already strong list that includes the New York Times and the BBC. Plus you can now get clustered results from several top American universities, medical web sites , and government sites including the US government and the World Bank. For more new search engines, see JNet Next Generation Page of search tools.
  
  

•   Geek Tools - Who Is Finding out who exactly is behind a web page can be an important way to verify information or track down targets of your investigation. The Geek Tool site offers one of simplest interfaces to do this, with fast results. For more ways to find web site owners, see JNet's Who is Behind a Web Page and also a feature article on the subject on the JNet Tips page.
  

•   BBC Monitoring This site - Newsbasemonitoring -- allows you to search and read thousands of news reports from radio, newspaper, internet, television and news agency broadcasts from over 3,000 sources in more than 150 countries, monitored by the BBC and then translated into English. Each article is about $10 US, but the search and headline results are free. So are email alerts which will notify you if your search term appears in a news report. For more news search tools, see JNet's Find News Page.
  
  

• Gurunet   Do more than browse.  This nifty add-on gets you more information on the words you select -- everything from the latest news, biographies, maps, statistics, translation, plus business and dictionary help. Click on any word -- not just on a web page, but even in your email or Word documents -- and Gurunet launches and retrieves information from its database. Extremely practical for news searches on the fly. You can download a trial version for free, but after 14 days it only does a dictionary and thesaurus search -- not the full news tools. The full version costs $39 US, but is well worth the price.
  
  
  

•   Ajeeb The only way to translate from Arabic to English. Not free, (English to Arabic is free though) but well worth the $15 a month if you want to read Arab web pages while covering the Iraq war. For more resources, see JNet's Translate Tools.

  
  
•   Alexa Page Rank Want to know how popular this page is and how it ranks on the web? This Alexa tool gives you not just rankings. It also tells you who is really behind a web page, who else links to their site and related sites. A great way to judge the credibility of a web site. You can also see the most popular web sites by topics. For more resources, see JNet's Who is Behind a Web Site Page
  
  
  

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  Click here for previous years:

  • 2002 Picks of the Week
  • 2001 Picks of the Week
  • 2000 Picks of the Week
  • 1999 Picks of the Week 
  • 1998 Picks of the Week
  • 1997 Picks of the Week