Roger Ricketson’s smile was enigmatic. When anyone looked his way they could not help being infected by his contagious facial expression. Something was definitely going right in this man’s life, but until now no one could quite put his or her finger on it. But now, as I look through my office window at man packing up his briefcase at end of workday, turning off his computer, I can’t help sneaking out my own mini-smile. I know his secret. Funny thing is, it wasn’t that hard to discover-it just took a few simple searches on my super-magic machine. The name computer doesn’t really give device enough credibility anymore, it has come a long way in last hundred years, computing is least of its positive attributes.

I’m not your average woman in workforce. Vice-President of a huge multinational corporation, millionaire, you’d think I’d be fulfilled with my life’s successes, but no matter how hard I try, something always seems to be missing. I wanted a bit of what Roger’s got and now I know what makes him tick. He wasn’t always like this, hell he used to be quite a grump. Being CEO of a giant pharmaceutical company can be a bit boring, especially when all your competitors are just mindless drones with only one thing on their mind-making more money. However, over last couple of years Roger’s persona had gradually changed, and I was sure it wasn’t from his business life.

So, being a bit of a sleuth-cross-hacker I recently tapped into Roger’s personal email account, definitely not an easy task, but then again I’ve always been far from average. It still took me 6 months in my spare time. I could be arrested but I just needed to know this man’s secret, and whenever someone would ask him why he was so happy, he would just smile and wink and then walk away. Well, now I know answer and I can tell you it sure was a shock! Roger belongs to a secret organization. The members of this group aren’t to be scoffed at either; world leaders, billionaires, famous intellectuals and academics fill boss’s contact list. There are also a lot of names I’ve never heard of; there are over 10 thousand members! As far as I can tell they only communicate on Internet, but from their dialogue they all seem tightly connected, and they do get a lot done. This is mind-blowing part, what they do!

1. Search engines

Google.com, yahoo.com - they represent one of best known search engines. SEs holds huge databases, for example google currently have more than 3 milliards records, to be able to process this information quantities server farms are used with thousands of computers. Search results contain pages where lookup words were met. Every SE has its own algorithm on what pages best much search criteria but all of them have aim to show most relevant results for user. SE weighty advantage is that search industry leaders have their databases filled by milliards of records referencing existing web sites on net, but they require from user to know most part of answer and some search experience to be able to type in correct keywords, otherwise as usually happens with novice users keywords may be really sensible for required lookup, turned out to be not that really used by most internet community in current field. As consequence search results are far from ideal, usually this are sites similar to looking-for but not that really useful. Only experience coming with time and hope on search engines will be more intellectual in future seems help. Another way is to spend more time on lookup and parse most of search results (more than first page of results) this will for sure move near to success. Also exists meta search engines (they don't have own databases but reuse and combine existing top search engines results together), they provide more optimized results and keep only most relative matches. Hear is list of most popular search and meta search engines:

Search engines by popularity:

http://google.com http://search.Yahoo.com http://search.msn.com http://excite.com http://netscape.com http://iwon.com http://askjeewes.com http://mywebsearch.com http://altavista.com http://dogpile.com http://infospace.com

Meta Search engines:

http://ez2www.com http://kartoo.com http://surfwax.com http://vivisimo.com http://webcrawler.com

2. Electronic libraries

Before internet era books was only considerable information resource available for public use. Library was that last authority where people feed knowledge and share their ideas and creative work with others. They still is but now internet gives excellent possibility to visit most popular world libraries not leaving your home from a single web page. Library online search tools gives you possibility to find required book almost at seconds and download to your PC for using. More and more libraries converting now their resources to digital format making life for millions of scientists, creative people and just readers as ease as they could not ever imagine before. Having required book on your desktop in digital format saves much time, standard search function available in any editor program will find required word or phrase almost immediately. Minimal requirements are any simple PC and internet connection.