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No one can issue an honest list of "best" Internet sites. The Internet is too big, and so is the word best. As the Web penetrates its way into more and more of our lives, best becomes entirely relative. Amazon.com is great for one-stop shopping, and perhaps the best e-commerce site by some standards, but if it's something specific I'm after, I can usually find it cheaper somewhere else. The following, therefore, is a list of the best sites I use regularly; these are the URLs at the top of my bookmark list.

There's a reason this site crashed repeatedly when it first launched: it may be the best thing to happen to the Internet since the Mosaic browser was released back in 1993. For the past decade, it has been difficult to find information on the Web that was both reliable and extensive. The Britannica folks could have just offered the text of their encyclopedias and would have had one of the best sites online. But they went so much further, offering news, Web site ratings, magazine articles, and other features. In essence, they've become something the Internet has always needed: an editor.

Speaking of reliable information, the best news sites on the Web are still those founded by traditional forms of media: The New York Times, ABCNews.com, CNN, BBC, etc. WorldNews.com is essentially a search engine for news sites, and works far better than any of the others I've visited. Visitors can browse the news by region or topic, but since I normally use it to find religion stories, I usually just use the search box. It works wonderfully, especially if you know how to use boolean expressions. The engine still returns several unrelated hits, but it's well worth the effort.

"Yahoo!?" I can hear some readers' jaws dropping already. Its search capabilities can be horrendous at times (Christianity Today, for example, has no description; Christian History magazine isn't even listed). And I agree. For searching, go somewhere else: Google wins my vote for most types of searches. But for information—still the Internet's raison d'être—Yahoo! thrills me daily. Its best resource, in my opinion, is its "Full Coverage" area. Want to know the latest on the Confederate Flag debate? Yahoo! has links to news stories, audio clips, newspaper editorials, and related Web sites. Its religion news coverage is also one of the best Internet resources on the topic. I often worry that by offering everything from auctions to travel services, Yahoo! will spread itself too thin. So far, unbelievably, there's little evidence of it. Though I'd love its index of Web sites to be more extensive, the only major thing I'd change about Yahoo! is that stupid exclamation mark.

Salon, once king of the Web magazines, has apparently issued an ultimatum to its writers mandating that all articles have a sexual angle. (It's become Nerve with articles about Linux.) Meanwhile, Slate gave up its experiment at paid subscriptions and went free again in February. Nice move, but its redesign in May was even better; Slate became one of the most usable, readable journals on the Web. Slate's longer articles are often very good, but its strength continues to be metajournalism, especially its "Today's Papers," "In Other Magazines," and "Egghead" departments. And "News Quiz" has to be one of the most original regular humor features on the Web.

Dave Eggers is the darling of the New York magazine world, which is somewhat strange because he has such an obvious disdain for it. He was an editor for Esquire after his satire magazine Might folded, but left disgusted to found McSweeney's, perhaps the best hybridization of a print and Internet magazine around. The Web version leans strongly toward the satire end, but without the over-the-top (and sometimes crass) jokiness of The Onion. I can't take too much of it at a sitting, but I've had enough satisfying visits to the Web site to warrant a subscription to the print version.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44