Background Checks
Books & Writing
Library of Congress bibliographic information
United States Post Office - rates, zip codes, etc.
Newspapers & Other Periodicals
American Journalism Review searches news sources.
Ecola Newstand searches newspaper and magazine databases. Links to home pages.
Newspaper Links links to newspapers with websites in the United States, Canada and some selected international newspapers. Handy for researching stories and/or writing letters.
Phone Number or Address
Switchboard - has a lot of information - you can have yourself listed there if not already listed and you want to be found. This is not necessarily a bad idea - IF you have a business or rescue and want people to be able to hook up with you. There are a number of free mailbox services (Juno, Excite, Hotmail, etc) that you can use in order to direct any email to that account rather than your "everyday" account.
Info Space - yellow pages, white pages, reverse directories, etc.
Super Pages - to search US business listings by category, etc.
Four 11 Directory Services aka Yahoo People Search - similar to the old 555-1212 site.
Celebrity Contact Information
Want to ask a celebrity to help support an equine cause? Here's a listing of their mailing or agent's mailing addresses at Celebrity Address Emporium
Rumors, Myths & Urban Legends
Got caught by the Neiman Marcus Cookie recipe? Believed the Good Times virus? Or just want to show folks that they are urban legends or a chain email? Here are some good sources to check the facts before you pass that note along to everyone YOU KNOW! (G)
Urban Legends - there are SO many ....
Search Engines
Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, so explore a bit and don't confine yourself to just one search engine!
Ask Jeeves type in what you are seeking in the form of a question and Jeeves will produce links from several search engines.
Dogpile - searches several major search engines at once as well.
Google - my current favorite.
A note about how a lot of search engines work:
The searches in most cases are based on what are called Meta Tags. To find an example of a meta tag, click on View (upper left hand corner of your screen) and then click on document source. (In Internet Explorer, do the same thing, then click on source - all browsers are pretty similar this way.) What you'll see is the coding for the webpage. Notice the 4th line from the top that starts with meta name. That's the meta tag to help search engines find hits:
meta name="keywords" content="horse, racing, equine, rescue,pony, mules, adoption, placement, retirement, thoroughbreds, standardbreds, quarterhorses, donkey, equine rescue, mailing list"
As you can see, I've tried to be reflective of what we discuss on the list and what is contained in the Equine Rescue Mailing List Home Page. You may want to check this out on other webpages as well (be warned, I've found a few that use some rather risque terms on pages that have NOTHING whatsoever to do with those terms - it appears that they are just there to get hits).
Travel
Interstate 4 U - if you're trying to make a connection or be sure that there's a place to eat while hauling or meeting up with someone, check out this site. Lists the hotels, restaurants, gas stations, attractions, outlet malls, etc near each of 11,000 interstate exits in the lower 48 states. It also displays maps of exits.
Usenet
Google Groups - You can do an advanced search to find posts of interest. Let's say that I want to do a search for all posts pertaining to adoption or rescue for a particular time period. I'd click on Advanced Groups Search and input the following (vary it as you like for whatever you'd like to find): under search for, put adoption or rescue; for group, input rec.equestrian (you can do others, but you may get some truly *weird* hits!); for dates, put in whatever dates you'd like to narrow it down to. Then click on "find".
Now do a new search and just look for all the posts by or referencing a particular poster via their email address. (I've munged my address up, so you can't find me - actually I do it to defeat the Evil Spammers.)
There ARE ways to defeat Google and others from archiving your posts to the Usenet Newsgroups - if you're reading newsgroups and you see one with this before the start of the message, "X-No-Archive: yes" that is supposed to keep it from being archived, HOWEVER, if someone quotes that message in a followup and doesn't use the same code, then the quoted portion will be archived.