The top websites of 2006.

COPYRIGHT 2007 VNU Business Media Europe

Byline: daniel griffin

sites with sizzle:

IWR's picks of the year

Exact Editions

This digital magazine platform makes content as searchable as in e-journals and e-books, with fast and reliable results. It even manages to find the keywords in adverts.

www.exacteditions.com

Factiva Search 2.0

Intended to assist in mining data from Factiva's news aggregation service, this site is aimed at the general end-user with no special search skills. Our test of the beta revealed an extremely powerful search tool.

www.factiva.com

Intute

Although Intute was criticised for changing its name from the Resource Directory Network, we liked the site's modern and crisp look and the attention it paid to detail. Particularly attractive was the way content was aligned along the right channels, which proved reliable when we conducted our own tests.

www.intute.ac.uk

Microsoft Windows Live Academic Search

The free search platform of scholarly journals gives access with full search to more than 4,000 scholarly journals (particularly IT, physics and electrical engineering) and the web.

http://academic.live.com

Poetry Archive

This appealing site with digitised recordings of poets reading their own work is a useful reference tool for students and academics. Hearing the poet's voice helps understand the motivations behind the art.

www.poetryarchive.org

Quosa

An information management application that offers search, organisation and sharing tools particularly for scientific, technical and medical online sources. We especially liked the simplicity of the Document Summary function, which compiles a mini-version of an article of interest at the click of a button.

www.quosa.com

Rollyo

A single search engine designed to trawl a registered user's most visited websites. Using the Yahoo platform, Rollyo personalises search results and allows the sharing of resources. Helps manage information overload.

www.rollyo.com

Techextra

The engineering-focused search engine mixes keywords with academic abstracts in its results, and offers teaching resources, jobs and industry news with all areas of business and academia in engineering covered.

www.techxtra.ac.uk/index.html

Trexy

The award-winning search trail technology has made inroads into the application of Search 2.0 by not only allowing researchers to track back through their own search results but also to share their information trails with other Trexy users.

www.trexy.com