by Laura Claire

Created on: May 14, 2008

The Internet is a vast frontier of information, opinion, and world access. It can be overwhelming to a new computer user, trying to determine which websites are worthy of exploration. My five favorites contain a large amount and variety of information in one place, they're useful to most people, and they are well-known, thus they are safe sites to visit.

1. Google.com

Google is an ever-expanding storehouse of worldwide knowledge in the form of text, audio, video, maps, links, and webpages. When you type in the web address, you land in a search box that can literally take you anywhere you want or need to go. This is the point at which most Google users stop, but it is only the beginning of the search capabilities of the most well-known search engine on the Internet. Refer to http://www.google.com/help/operators.html for information on how to best refine your searches, to find more of what you're looking for in less time.

Aside from the aforementioned search capabilities, Google possesses an endless array of fun and informative features. There are specific searches for books, scholarly papers, news, and historical archives. If you create an account with Google, other features are at your disposal-Gmail, Google checkout, newsgroups, a personalized homepage, and many more. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the more advanced features of this search engine, and you'll be a master of web efficiency.

2. Pandora.com

Pandora is one of the most unique formats of Internet music service, because it provides the best of personalized preferences combined with the opportunity for a wealth of discovery. Subscription is free, and open to anyone within the United States, but due to music licensing issues beyond Pandora's control, the service is not available overseas at this time.

You start by typing your favorite song or artist into Pandora's database, which encompasses well over half a million songs. From there, Pandora creates a personalized radio station for you. It's possible to add artists and songs to broaden the station's playlist, rate the songs played to focus the station, and "ban" an artist or song. Pandora uses the musical genome project to match songs and musical stylings to your preferences. This project seeks to rate each song in the database on over four hundred musical dimensions from attributes of the singer's voice, to instrumentation, to song tempo. You can maintain up to a hundred stations, and listen to stations that have been created by other Pandora

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