A tour of Web sites that can help you on trips, with shopping, keeping the faith or just having fun.

By DAVE GUSSOW
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 8, 2002

The NFL is hot; Pokemon is not. Dragonball is hot; pro wrestling is not. And Britney Spears just keeps rolling along.

Aaron Schatz has been keeping tabs of what people search for on the Web since 1999 for the Lycos 50 (50.lycos.com/), a weekly tabulation of the favorite topics for surfers at Lycos' search engine. And he sees changes online.

"We've seen the Internet become more representative of America as a whole," said Schatz, whose title is simply writer of the Lycos 50. "We saw more of a democratic use of the Internet, all ages, both genders, all different kinds of groups using the Internet."

Our collective quest for pop culture dipped for about a week after Sept. 11, but Schatz says it quickly returned to normal. Now, the frivolous and the serious live side-by-side in Web searches.

So here are some of the sites we find useful or just interesting. We tried to stay away from the well known, such as Amazon, Google and Expedia, to shine a spotlight on more obscure destinations. If you have any to share, send nominations to techtimes@sptimes.com.

And know that you are not alone if you're fascinated by the online world.

"I love my job," Schatz said.

Pack your bags

Searches for travel and airline tickets dropped substantially after Sept. 11. Schatz says those categories are just returning to normal.

For those making plans for travel abroad, the State Department site (www.state.gov/) has a wealth of information, including travel warnings, advisories and advice. The Library of Congress (lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html) offers research guides to countries, but a colleague who recommends it offers this caution: Some may be a bit too dry and detailed for younger users.

Now, let's take a Time Out (www.timeout.com). If you plan to visit one of 33 cities around the world -- from London to Paris to New York to San Francisco -- this guide gives a lot of useful information. It includes restaurant listings, coupons, entertainment, attractions and more. Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com), another guide, has useful bulletin boards to go along with other information.

Some basics can be found for things such as currency conversion (www.oanda.com), worldwide time zones (www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/) and phone dialing and access codes (www.att.com/business_traveler/cgi/access.cgi?c=a). If you're doing travel research online and find sites in a foreign language, Babel Fish (babelfish.altavista.com) will handle the translation.

And just for fun, www.us-highways.com gives you all you want to know and more about U.S. highways.

Information, please

Surfers do not live by Google alone.

In fact, Ixquick (www.ixquick.com/) boasts that it's "the world's most powerful metasearch engine." It comes highly recommended from one of our ace news researchers.

Sometimes you don't have to go far from home. The Clearwater Public Library's site (www.clearwater-fl.com/cpl/) won rave reviews as Site of the Month in September at LibrarySpot.com.

"From the looks of their site, the librarians at the Clearwater Public Library don't spend much time standing still," LibrarySpot wrote. "If you can find it online, you're bound to find it somewhere on the library's well-organized site."

It's easy to keep up with the news from back home or around the world. AllYouCanRead.com and NewsLink (www.newslink.org/) offer links to hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide.

Arts & Letters Daily (www.artsandlettersdaily.com) has a growing legion of fans. It scans the Web for news and reviews for "the most intellectually stimulating sites on the Internet, updating daily, and making the best of the Web available at a click."

People can look up Florida statutes at www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/, and statistics from more than 100 federal agencies can be found at www.fedstats.gov.

And Snopes.com lets you know about the hoaxes floating around online. That could save people from continuing to think Congress is about to pass a 5-cent e-mail tax (the bogus Bill 602p message).

Shopping

Choosing the right gift basket can be a challenge, particularly when many sites don't allow you to customize what you send. So when shopping for a friend injured in an auto accident, TheSmileBox.com turned out to be perfect.

We chose what we wanted, got a confirmation e-mail that it was shipped and received a rave review of the cookies included in the package -- a bright yellow box with, of course, a smiley face.

For books, AddAll.com automatically compares prices among reputable online bookstores and finds the best offer for any book you're seeking. And the Advanced Book Exchange (www.abe.com) lists hundreds of small used-book stores, good for finding out-of-print books.

Replacements Ltd. (www.replacements.com/) claims to have more than 8.6-million pieces of china, crystal, silver and collectibles. It's a nice place to visit after, say, that plate crashes to the floor.

And a good place to find information is About.com, which offers 450 topics run by experts in fields ranging from Automotive to Travel. The site has a reputation for authoritative info and tips.

Close to home

As we noted last year, My Florida (www.myflorida.com) gives good access to state government agencies and information. But we also have some valuable sites closer to home.

The Hillsborough Property Appraiser's Office (www.hcpafl.org/) lets you check out property values in your neighborhood, and the nosey get a glimpse of how the rich and famous live, complete with floor plans, with an easy to use name search.

The Pinellas Property Appraiser (pao.co.pinellas.fl.us/) offers similar information, including aerial photos. It does not have the name search that Hillsborough does.

(Once you check out property values, you might decide you're in the market for a new home. If so, you'll find information on financing it at www.mortgagemath.com.)

Records for lawsuits, divorces and property transfers can be found at the Hillsborough Clerk of the Circuit Court (publicrecord.hillsclerk.com/), and arrest histories for those who found themselves on the wrong side of the law in Hillsborough can be found at the Sheriff's Office site (www.hcso.tampa.fl.us/pub/).

Traffic information can be found through the Florida Highway Patrol (www.fhp.state.fl.us/). And Pinellas residents can find what the emergency is by going to the Department of Emergency Services (www.co.pinellas.fl.us/ces/currentactivity.html).

PC stuff

When PCs work, we love them. When they don't (far too often), we curse them. So here are a few sites to help when the PC isn't humming. According to our e-mail, missing drivers for things such as video cards, printers and DLL (dynamic link library) files frustrate many users.

You can find more than 60,000 drivers at www.driverguide.com. Registration is free and requires only your name and an e-mail address. A couple of places to check for missing DLL files, which are needed to run most programs in Windows, are the DLL Download Center (www.uforesources.com/) and PCdrivers.com.

PC Pitstop (www.pcpitstop.com) checks under the hood of your PC to give you a rundown of what's working well. Diagnostic tests check your hard drive, processor, monitor, memory and disk drives and let you know what may need attention. Tests can be done anonymously or users can register for free. The main benefit of registration is that it stores results and lets you compare against earlier tests.

Adding random access memory is one of the best and least expensive ways to improve your computer's performance. Recent prices on 128 megabytes of RAM have been in the $20 range. Crucial Technology (www.crucial.com) not only has good prices, it also has a nice feature that walks you through your system specs to make sure you get exactly the kind of RAM you need.

Celebrity sitings

The famous hang out online, at least virtually. Who2 (www.who2.com) gets you clicking with its promotional line "Find Famous People Fast."

Type in a name, and it will give a short bio and related links. It also features trivia such as birthdays, most popular Web pages and a "Curious Collection of Famous People," ranging from those who have disappeared mysteriously to cartoon characters.

Ain't It Cool News (www.aintitcoolnews.com) isn't the prettiest site, but it has lots of gossip about films and actors.

Music fans will like SetList (www.setlist.com/), which features lists of the songs bands play in concerts. It could help you decide whether it's worth those phenomenal ticket prices to attend a performance.

Keeping the faith

More people seem to be turning to religion with the world being in the state it is.

At www.religion-online.org/, you can find more than 3,600 articles by scholars writing about different faiths covering a wide variety of topics, from the Bible to social issues and ethics.

Church Sunday school teachers might find www.youthpastor.com valuable for game and lesson ideas, and www.beliefnet.com for discussion topics.

A site that opened in March highlights Jewish life in America in the early 20th century. The Yiddish Radio Project (www.yiddishradioproject.org) features the "Yid-O-Matic," which lets users listen to radio broadcasts in Yiddish while reading the text onscreen.

Kid safety

Protecting kids online has become a big deal, and a good place to start is with e-mail. Kinderstart (www.kinderstart.com/filteredmail.html) has a service that screens incoming and outgoing e-mail and promises to block anything obscene from getting through.

Two Dog Net Inc. (www.childrensinternet.com) is for parents who want their kids to enjoy the online world without risk. The service charges $69.95 a year, but the Web site offers a free software CD, so parents can see how it allows kids to visit only safe sites online.

And NETEgories (www.netegories.com) is a search portal that says it will not list "adult, illegal or undesirable" sites.

Museum pieces

The International UFO Museum & Research Center (www.iufomrc.org) -- hey, this is the Web! -- will tell you all you want to know or more visitors from other planets. The Museum of E-Failure (www.disobey.com/ghostsites/) gives you a glimpse of the Web's dot-com glory days through its collection of dearly departed sites.

-- Information from Times staff was used in this report. Dave Gussow can be reached at gussow@sptimes.com or (727) 445-4228.

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