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5. Google Scholar beta

Google Scholar searches journals in the arts and humanities, business, science, medicine, and mathematics. It turns up abstracts and sometimes full articles that are indispensable for academic and professional research and points to libraries that keep the hard copies. One downside: Scholar doesn't let you subscribe to newsfeeds for your search queries, while rival Windows Live Academic beta does. So far, however, Scholar retrieves more content.
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6. Google Book Search

Google's goal to digitize the world's libraries has hit some copyright snags, but Mountain View continues to sign deals with universities, scan books, and put their pages online. You can read the entire text of books in the public domain or see excerpts from, say, Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot, before committing to buy the hard copy. Props are due to Project Gutenberg, the first major effort to make e-books free.
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4. Diigo beta

How helpful is it to bookmark a Web
site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo's Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won't have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places.
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