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Best Web Sites

Internet Product of the Year, Best Search Engine

Google: "God created the world," an anonymous sage once mused, "but it's held together with duct tape." Call Google the Internet equivalent of duct tape: a universal tool that stretches our perceptions of what a search engine can do. Which is why it's not just our Internet Product of the Year but also our overall Product of the Year.

Granted, the Web continues to endure Darwinian hard times. Most surviving sites are hunkering down, larding up with increasingly grating ads, and scrambling to convert freebie-loving surfers into paying customers. Even Yahoo, our perennial pick as Best Portal, has alienated some longtime users. But Google remains, well, Google. Though it does sport more ads these days, it preserves its lean, mean, and highly functional personality. And yup, it's still free.

Google has always pinpointed ordinary Web pages with eerie precision, but it now ups the ante by capably capturing a wide range of online content. For example, Google indexes the contents of millions of files in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format, and it lets you view these documents in your browser--no plug-in or download required.

Meanwhile, specialized Googles track specific types of information. Google News Search lets you browse reports from an array of sources moments after they hit the Web. The massive newsgroup archive maintained at Google Groups lets you get user reviews of a cool new digital camera or go back in time to glimpse how pioneering posters reacted to the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981. You can even rummage through digital replicas of dead-tree catalogs from companies like PC Connection and J. Crew, courtesy of Google Catalogs.

How good is this site? If you're too impatient to read our search-engine report " The Straight Story on Search Engines," remember this simple three-word mantra: Try Google first. It's that accurate, that versatile, that indispensable.

Best News and Information

NYTimes.com: A Web site that served up a daily electronic version of "All the News That's Fit to Print" would be admirable in itself. But last year, when the most important news story in decades changed our lives overnight, nothing mattered more than expert reporting and analysis--and NYTimes.com continues to deliver exactly that. The site (free with registration) also capitalizes on the Internet's outstanding ability to combine text, audio, video, and graphics in new and innovative ways. A recent retrospective on the movie The Shining, for instance, included high-quality video of scenes that were discussed in the article, along with a link to the Times' original review of the film. Streaming audio clips feature music critics discussing new albums, interspersed with snippets from the albums. And the site's free e-mail newsletters can be custom-crafted to fit your specific interests.

Best Portal

Yahoo: Our favorite site that still does a bit of everything, from e-mail to searches to auctions, continues to do them all well. Some of its once-free features now carry a fee, but Yahoo remains the Net's best one-stop destination.

Best Recreation/Entertainment

Fark.com: Irreverent, addictive, and more than a little cheeky, Fark.com has earned its place as the primo source of "Hey, check this out" links.

Best Web Shopping

Amazon.com: Quick, where do you look first when you're shopping online? Okay, who said Kozmo? Amazon's huge selection and active community of user reviewers make it our favorite shopping site, and one of the most useful resources on the Web. No wonder it's still going strong.