1-Click Answers

One of my favorite tools that I've never written a blog entry for is 1-Click Answers from Answers.com. If you've yet to use Answers.com, it's a search engine that lets you search for a particular word or person or subject (or just about anything else) and it pools various reference sources such as Wikipedia, Houghton Mifflin, or the American Heritage Dictionaries to tell you about that subject. 1-Click Answers from Answers.com is a tool that simplifies searching Answers.com. All you do is Alt-Click any text from just about any window, and a small bubble (like you see above) will appear with the abridged results from Answers.com relating to that word. Here's a few of the ways I find 1-Click Answers useful:

• When I'm reading an article and I'm not sure what a word means.
• If I'm writing an article and want a quick thesaurus, or I'm not sure if I'm using a word correctly.
• To quickly check the spelling of a word (Google Desktop is great for this, too.)
• If there is a person or subject referenced that I want to learn more about, quickly.

Another optional feature of 1-Click Answers is "Today's Highlights". When turned on, this feature will display facts about things that happened on this day in history, links to today's top news stories, and an interesting or little-known word or phrase that has been used in the news recently. This is a nice way to get yourself a little better educated and keep up with basic current events.

Read: 1-Click Answers to download.