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Getting questions answered by real people frequently beats out trying to find the answer on the Internet yourself. Not to be outdone by their competitors, you can now get people to answer questions at all three big search engines: Google Answers, MSN’s LiveQnA , and Yahoo Answers .

Finding answers to simple questions (”Where is Basle?”) is pretty easy if you are in a browser. For those time when you not, 1-Click Answers is a free tool from Answers.com that provides short pop-up answers in any computer application, such as a word processor or PDF document. The small answer screen will not interrupt your work, but if you want additional information, you can click any of the links and open an Internet browser.

In conjunction with its sponsorship of New York’s Shakespeare in the Park summer festival, Google has just released Google: Shakespeare . Use it to search for familiar Shakespeare quotes (”Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”) or to read entire works online. His works are organized by genre and title, and searchable (using Advanced Book Search) either individually or as a whole.

When you are looking for a single fact or an answer to a simple problem, here are three sites to search in addition to the usual Google and Yahoo. Answers.com delivers definitions and explanations on over one million topics. Amazon.com Search Inside the Book delivers millions of pages from print books. And Wikipedia which is not edited by professional fact checkers, but is still a pretty reliable resource for non-controversial topics.

I often use Google to check the spelling of a single word. If it is a recognized word, a definition link will display in the upper right-hand corner. For spell checking paragraphs or longer documents when you do not have access to a modern word processing, there are several sites that provide free online spell checking. Here are two: : SpellCheck.net and Jspell.

Most school and public libraries pay for a variety of premium databases that can be accessed by patrons. Now you can configure Google Scholar to highlight articles that are available through your particular library by setting your Scholar Preferences. Read more at Google Scholar Library Links. Not already familiar with Google Scholar? Here’s an introduction.

POS means “parents over shoulder” but COS doesn’t mean “children over shoulder.” It means “change of subject.” To keep up with all the latest chat acronyms, try NetLingo, Big Blue Ball or AbbreviationZ.

If you are increasingly frustrated with “Results 1 - 10 of about 1,193,000,” try Answers.com. instead of your usual search engine. It is one of my favorite sites because it consistently finds the short answers I am looking for. Answers.com also works great on web-enabled cell phones and other small screen devices. If you use any of their answers in a term paper, click on “Cite” to get a properly formatted bibliographic citation.

A meta-search engine is one that submits your search query to multiple search engines simultaneously. DoubleTrust is one that combines results from the two most popular search engines: Google and Yahoo! It has some cool features, such as allowing you to indicate which engine you trust more, and the listing of “orphans” (sites which only appear in one of the engines.)