Web Sites We Can't Live Without

How big is the Web, really? One attention-getting calculation, from Alexa Internet, estimated that there are more than 20 million "content areas" on the Web, that 1.5 million new pages get added to the Web every day, and that the Web doubles in size every eight months.

We don't know how accurate those figures are. What we do know is that as the Web gets bigger, we get choosier about how we spend our time on it. In fact, as we thought about how we surf across the ocean of news, opinion, and other resources available on the Web, we realized that there are fewer than a dozen sites that have become indispensable to how we do our work and how we spend our days. These sites aren't just interesting places to visit -- they've become Web sites that we can't live without: services that have worked their way into our everyday lives.

Here, then, is an utterly unscientific, thoroughly opinionated, and absolutely genuine review of the Web sites that we find to be most valuable. We also review eight Web tools that we can't live without -- everything from online dictionaries to zip-code finders -- and four email newsletters that we can't live without. We don't want you to stop surfing. But we do want you to stop long enough at these sites to see the best of what the Web has to offer.

Business Is Their Business

How did Patricia Pomerleau, 49, founder and executive editor of CEO Express! (http://www.ceo-express.com) go about building a Web site that we can't live without? By building a site that she couldn't live without. CEO Express! bills itself as a site created "by a busy executive for busy executives." Busy people at companies such as Polaroid and Oracle -- and Fast Company -- believe that it delivers the goods.

Back in the summer of 1996, Pomerleau launched a consulting company that focused on helping executives in big companies -- a group of people famous for their aversion to all things Internet -- to understand the business value of the Web. Before long, she realized that she needed a tool to direct her clients to sites that would be of maximum value to people just like them -- that is, to businesspeople who are serious about their work but who don't have time for leisurely Web surfing.

Thus was born CEO Express! "My goal wasn't to make the Internet easier to navigate," explains Pomerleau. "It was to make my clients' lives easier -- to help them get the right information as quickly as possible, so that they could get back to work." The idea worked for Pomerleau too. In June 1998, she closed down her consulting firm to focus full-time on her Web site.

Pomerleau understands the sort of information and ideas that senior executives need, and she has created a simple, well-organized set of links to that material. There's a list of newspaper links that focuses on the big-city papers that most businesspeople care about. There's also a collection of links to international-news, business, and technology magazines that offers the best of the best -- in other words, the most relevant of the most relevant. There's a collection of statistics-oriented links, as well as useful travel tools and other links that may not be of interest to teenagers or Java nerds -- but that are of great interest to businesspeople.

"Senior executives like information that's edited," Pomerleau says. "There aren't many sites of this kind that have a human editor."

CEO Express! also pays close attention to maintaining and updating all of its links. Pomerleau employs a human "link checker," who makes sure that every link on the site takes visitors to the right place. The link checker also makes sure that a site's content or philosophy hasn't changed in a way that makes the site incompatible with the mission of CEO Express!

"We are careful about making sure that our links are the best ones out there," says Pomerleau. "If we find a great link -- say, a new business-law site -- then we remove an old link to make room for the new one. Our goal isn't to have more and more links. It's to make our visitors' lives easier."

The special value of CEO Express! is its selectivity. The awesome power of Hoover's Online (http://www.hoovers.com) is its comprehensiveness. Hoover's Online is one of the very few Web sites that we pay cold, hard cash to use. It charges a monthly fee of $14.95 (or an annual fee of $109.95), and it's worth every penny. We spend lots of hours fielding pitches from companies, preparing for meetings with product evangelists -- in short, encountering businesses for the first time. Which means that we ask the same questions that businesspeople ask about a potential customer, supplier, or partner: How big is this company? How well is it doing? What's up with its stock price? What other companies does it do business with?