Great Web Sites You've (Probably) Never Visited

With the W^³ being on everyone minds for the past 10 years, there have come about a number of interesting websites that may not be a part of everyone's internal database. Sure, you know about the Yahoos, the eBays, and the Amazon.coms, but here is a list of some that might not yet be a part of your World Wide Web o' knowledge.

Adcritic.com- Admit it, you only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. But, Gramma decided to call you right in the middle of the commercial break that had the whole room full of laughter, when you returned. Don't you wish you could have seen what everyone was going nuts over? Well, now you can with the amazing new Adcritic.com! It slices! It dices!…errr…it can show you every commercial that you missed during the annual football battle. It even ranks them for you according to site-visitor votes. Not Super Bowl season? Don't worry! Commercials air all year long so the site is continually updated. The best part is that they receive commercials that might have been too risqué to air on regular TV. The only caveat to all this commercial goodness is that you have a good Internet connection, since the videos are decent sized Windows' Medias.



Salary.com - If you are like me and looking for a job, you are probably curious about who will hire you and how much money you will earn. Well, this site can give you some advice on the latter. How much does an Albuquerque-based third level Tax Accountant earn per year? What does a Cook living in Boston bring home each year? As you can see, the real treat of this site is the number of jobs you can see the range for. That's right * it doesn't just give you a single number, it gives you a range starting at the 25th percentile, the median level, and up to the 75th of all workers in that area. It's great stuff for job hunters and those curious about what their pay could be in another city.



Mysimon.com - I had figured that most people would have heard of this site by now, but I was told in a marketing class that only 20% of e-shoppers use a shopping search engine (also called a "bot"; short for "robot"). The case could be that a larger number of people know about them but can't be bothered to use them. However, the glass is always half empty for me so, I feel it is necessary to explain why you should use "bots" and, more specifically, why Mysimon.com. The main purpose of these sites is to search, among the web, for the cheapest price on a large variety of products, from books to baby toys. The reason I like Mysimon is that it doesn't provide any useless information on the home page. The left side has empty blocks where you can search via keywords. The second section allows you to browse specific products under a number of headings. Once you actually find the product you are looking for, you can then sort your listings by merchant, merchant quality (furnished by Gomez.com), manufacturer model, and price. After finding the best price, you just click on the item and it jumps you directly to the website that is selling the item. How much easier can it be?



Pricewatch.com - Being the type of guy that dislikes paying Ma Dell to build a computer for me, I prefer to purchase computer parts separately. The trick is finding them inexpensively. I could use Mysimon.com (above) to do this, but there is another site that deals with smaller, more specialized web-stores. Pricewatch.com's sole purpose is to lead customers to these stores. The site, itself, is very bare bones; it doesn't have any graphics. Instead of formal advertising, the companies that appear, pay a monthly fee to Pricewatch. The homepage is great and lists almost every computer part you can think of: fans, motherboards, hard drives, RAM, monitors - even printer paper. They have also begun to list some consumer electronics, but these categories aren't as complete as those for computer products. The homepage shows each type of product available for listing and when clicked, a sub-menu appears which gives even more detailed options for that product. For example, if you click on "Processors - PC", it lists all speeds of Pentium III, Celeron, AMD Duron, and AMD Athlon and their subsequent lowest prices. A click on any of these speeds gives you the complete listing for that processor. Each listing contains: the product brand, the product name, description, price, shipping charge, date the price was registered and the retailer's contact info. The listing is always sorted by price and cannot be changed. The top of the homepage (and every page) has a great search engine, which is helpful if you have a specific model in mind. If you wish to upgrade your current PC and don't want to pay CompUSA to do it, give these guys a look.



Salescircular.com - Here's a site that has caused me to stop subscribing to the local newspaper. It provides its users with weekly sale items for all Brick and Mortar stores in their state. That's right; it has individual listings for each state. Its predominant use is for electronics and their ilk (TV's, VCR's. dishwashers, digital cameras, MP3 players, computer products, etc.) But, it also has PC software, console games, and DVD movies. It does not have any method of sorting and it is always cataloged by price (cheapest first). The information it lists is the: store's name, model name/number, product description, price, dates of sale, and any other necessary info (extra rebates and such). Give it a try. Even though it's a bit counterintuitive for a website to be promoting retail stores, I've found that there are some great sales that outdo even the best E-commerce sites.

DVD Sites

Bargainflix.com, DVDpricesearch.com, Bargain-central.com


Even though their number has significantly died down, coupons for DVD purchases are still available. Many of them do require you to be a "new customer" to that e-tail site, but if you haven't yet made a purchase, then this is the best way to do it. In addition, these sites show you which other sites are having specials on specific DVD's or are having a blowout sale of 75% off everything. The coupons can usually be used for all items on the site, so keep this in mind as well. DVDpricesearch.com also has an engine to search for the best price among all DVD e-commerce sites and shows you the total price - including shipping costs!



Gamingdepot.com - This one has a pretty small audience, but for those interested, this is a killer. Remember all those PC games you used to play about ten years ago? Maybe some of those old Sierra adventure games? No? How about some of the early Apogee Mario-esque game? Not those either? Well, this site provides a large number of games that are not currently supported by their original publisher since they are just too old! They are sorted by genre and some provide screen shots and mini-reviews. One nice thing is that you are almost guaranteed to have everything there run on a five-year old Pentium 1. Check it out - you may find something of interest.