Information - Reference - Web sites for browsing Internet content

Ready-reference sites can connect you to answers; these sites include language reference works like dictionaries and thesauruses, fact sites like almanacs and encyclopedias, computational and knowledge sites, and links to further ready reference collections.

• Infoplease: Look up almost any fact; an integrated dictionary, encyclopedia, almanac, biographies, and atlas; Information Please's history goes back to a 1938 radio quiz show, an annual almanac starting in 1947; and a Web site since 1998
• Dictionary+: Dictionary, thesaurus, Spanish-English, Medical; look up terms from a professionally-edited source, Merriam-Webster
• Melissa: Melissa Data Free Online Lookups; free address and ZIP Code-related information lookup services from Melissa Data, a mailing lists, software, and data company; provides a clean, usable interface to a range of free lookup services that could save you hours of time; find campaign contributors, nonprofit organizations, occupants by zip code, business counts by SIC code, income by zip code, US and worldwide place names, etc.
• Wolfram|Alpha: knowledge engine (facts, computation, statistics, calculator); NOTE: this is not a keyword search engine--see the directory of examples to get an idea of how to use this effectively; pulls together facts from a variety of sources; for example: find the population of Boston, the square root of 175, the diameter of Neptune, winner of the 1896 Olympic men's marathon, the King of Spain; integrate sin x dx from x=0 to pi; plot the parabola 3x*x + 4y + 3 = 0;
• Unit Converter: convert units of measure in a wide range of quantities; note that "Mass" is what you would want to convert weight
• HowStuffWorks: explanations of how things work; well-written and succinct articles give encyclopedia-like descriptions, specializing in how things work (steam engines, the Internet, solar cells, etc)
• Translation: Google translate; paste or write text into this form and select the language you want to convert it to; you can even paste a text of an unknown language and let it detect the language
• Refdesk: reference portal; large collection of links that guide you to a wide variety of reference and information sources on the Web; so massive that it nearly is a subject tree of Web resources itself; edited by Bob Drudge, father of Matt Drudge (Drudge Report)

Is something missing or incorrect? Suggestion? Please send a note to johndecember@gmail.com with the subject info-surf.