I am not sure how exactly I chanced upon Answers.com today, but I became a fan in about five minutes. The site is incredibly useful for getting information on concepts, things, people, places etc. versus pure (and blind) search.

What I like most about it is that you don’t have to go to their website to search. If you install their 1–Click Answers mini-app, you can Alt-Click on any word in any text area on your screen (doesn’t matter which application it is) and you instantly get a browser page with lots of helpful and relevant information about that word.

The site doesn’t fare too well on phrases, returning a standard Google search result list in those cases, but for nouns, it works remarkably well.