There is no question that the Web is the largest, most accessible and distributed information repository.

There is so much information on the Web -according to Wikipedia, there were more than 11.5 billion Web pages in the publicly indexable Web back in January 2005- and an increase need to have a “friendly” and “comprehensive” mechanism to gather information that a search engine like Google -whose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.“- is the 4th website in traffic on the Web according to Alexa and one of the most successful and powerful Internet companies with reported revenues of $4.83 billion for the last 2007 quarter.

Even if Google -because of its search algorithm- provides most of the time highly relevant results I prefer to use the following sources that thanks to their nature allow us to find fresh and consolidated authoritative content:

  • del.icio.us:

    As a social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us allows us not only to keep, tag and share our favorite web content but also to search for the most relevant bookmarked sites. By searching through del.icio.us we can get not only fresh but also popular results by seeing how many people have “saved” that information.

  • Slideshare:

    The largest presentation sharing community has a search feature through which we can find the most relevant presentations for a specific topic. By searching we also get additional and very useful information to evaluate each result: how long ago the presentations were uploaded and the number of views and downloads they have had.

  • Bloglines:

    Bloglines’ “Search for Feeds” option allow us to find information in blogs and news feeds. The results are ordered by the number of subscribers they have.

  • Technorati:

    A search engine for blogs and other user generated content. It tracks 112.8 million blogs in real time providing extremely “fresh” results. Each blog include a “Technorati Authority” score that represents the amount of blogs linking to the website in the last six months.

  • Myriad Search:

    An ad free meta search tool that allows us to get Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask results simultaneously, combining them by summing up the sites authority score for each search engine to give us a “consolidated” authoritative results list.

What are your favorites tools, services or mechanisms to find authoritative content?

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